Love love love...

You forget it because you think you have to.

You remember it because you don’t.

You cling to it as the last bastion of humanity,

rival government, too governed or  no choice.

How can it be, this and that and yours and mine

and lengthy and short and desperate and

divine and sacred and blasphemous? How can it keep

coming back like a virus? 

 

Your light penetrates the window of my apartment
where I feel so safe, so impenetrable and you shed your rays like a search light back and forth, cleansing the perimeter, making yourself known.
Devastated by the thought police and relentless dictation of what is,
what is to come, what could have been and what clearly never happened. You ask so much of me when I don't even have a clue.
 

You pushed the Jew in me to the edge with your counter intuitive diatribe from the tribe to the even more tribal, if there is such a thing, a people, the so-called "non-Jew." Your testament to love, sideswiped by the organs of lust and (mis)trust. To the destiny of the writer.


Life? You don't own it. The takeover inescapable, the worth not much with invention, reinvention or intervention. No way to come clean truly because after all these years we can't tell the difference.


p.s. you boys, there is a thought process that crosses gender equally, as unremarkable as yours.

Years compressed
a blank slate the wish
instead of a history redundant,
intransigent, intolerable.
More of the same without a new outcome,
only more virulent in its expression.


Unlike most long term relationships
that fade over time, lose traction,
lose passion, lose significance.
Released unconditionally, untainted by loss.


But this thing, this thing we have created
is darker than dark, from the deepest part of the known,
broadcasts despair and channels ever living memory into
one single thought. When will it ever end?

 All is right when your crinoline circles the universe in cerulean and songbird yellow, dark eyes chiaroscuro, patented L-O-V-E. You are all that we believe no matter how long and how arduous the journey. Licks and slaps and big do(s), look-a-likes, you strong, strapping males, more tattoo than tan, tattoo over tan over ass, over the last  one. Never really over, not really. Sweet boy of 12 with that big groove-on looking like his big dyke mother. uck me! It ain’t the music or the occasion or the grief. Ain’t the Prop Million March or the visit to the cemetery in the face of a man I once loved like a soul brother. Deliver me this day from my journey that is elation, emancipation, liberation, creation in every cell of my body at once thrilled. Mind you I am, but I am not mindless. Your beauty overwhelms.

Ray Charles in my blood, bag o' rags and nights in the attic of my girlfriend's house. Just friends - the old definition. Trying to sort out
sister love and hate, father drunk always accompanied by a pail of white paint and the prospect of passing out and mom, oh what a believer. No stopping her and her sexy self. None of it quite added up but this was my chosen teenage family and when she walked through my door, the vibration stopped, the music was syncopated, the couches long and filled with possibility. She knew she could hide there. Her house was my escape. My house was her refuge. 

What incredible views from down here,
from that place we all travelled before
but this time the destination is new.
A touch, a glance, an impression so powerful it floats,
like the gravity of a new planet undiscovered, 
brilliantly lit and surrounded by an atmosphere 
you no longer have to adjust to.
Family, that strange and other worldly space
nothing else can replace, to which nothing else compares.
All the years that passed, all the oblivion and misconceptions,
all the baggage you cannot check, has somehow disappeared.

New word, old meaning
on this Day of Independence
from love, humility, trust.
Our humanity in jeopardy. Thanks, Frank (Rich),
for pointing out how far we've come
but how far we have to go.
Our president a moving target,
our streets a home without walls,
our nation only one in a global community for all
struggling against the isms that imprison our thinking,
one nation after all.