February 21st, 2010 by Hoopleton

I feel the rain. And the sun. And the moon. I feel the snow on my face. I feel the wind against my back and the dead leaves under my bare feet. I feel the grass and the trees rising around me. The clouds parting. The lightening coil with an explosion of terrible harmony writhing against the heavens.

These things are hardly immaterial. They are untoward signs of rejuvenation. Or is it reconstitution? Perhaps birthing. It doesn’t matter, our language is too imperfect, but back on point, it’s a beginning most definite.

I am only slowed by my uncertainty. I still have no real notion of what a man is, the examples I’m allotted are mostly defective. Broken and violent. Bestial. Carnal. Ferine. What has made them this way? Flawed design or illicit tampering? And in this equation what is my sum total? Am I the aberration?

Because I can feel?

Because I am overwhelmed by feeling?

Because the feelings that overwhelm me are too much?

Too much for my body?

Too much for my soul?

Too much for my spirit to repress, reverse or revile?

Because I love?

Because I am loved?

Because I have love?

Because we have everything to hope for?

Because we have meaning?

Because we as a single jarring atom have a greater meaning than the soft rhythm of a bouncing, gyrating, whirling string of energy.

And since all that has passed will come again and again I feel the replete wholeness of all that was and everything that may be. Forever. Into the sliding dark. And the sun. And the moon. And the organic entirety of celestial habitation. Choirs of angels. An orchestra of resplendent green, living agony. Until the stars rupture and only radioactive dust lingers within the cathedral gates.

Not, mind you, that I am at all closer to knowing what a man should be or to what a man ever was, but I’d like to think that gender is as meaningless as any word, the Word, spoken by any prophet or god or profiteering preacher that ever walked the Earth. And only in this do I find the certainty to let go of all my burdens. To feel. To laugh. To cry. To be the animal capable of grace, of place, of self-awareness.

To be this, as I am, as we are, this is rejuvenation. The prodigious incarnation of creation. The spark of life. The totality of genesis. Lingering for always. Right up till the falling, collapsing, foundering of the bright blue sky.

February 7th, 2010 by Hoopleton

Waist deep in the muck and thouroughly without conscious. Manipulative bastards every mouth breathing abuser one of you. Men? I see none. Little better than animals we’d say and we’d be right as death.

I see the leather belt straps taut round your fists. That cruel, hungry glaze over your eyes. I know you mean to murder us. Catch us asleep and rob us of our dreams. Force your violence on us. But we have sharp knives and a memory that stretches back to before creation. We have the knowledge of God. The strength of Titans. The perpetuity of righteousness.

It’s when you think you’ve won that we’ll cleanse the Earth of all your sin. We’ll raise armies to crusify you. We’ll hang your bodies in the town squares and in the food courts of shopping malls, we’ll make rag dolls of them. Purification through torture, just as you taught us. We’ve been keeping notes.

And when you’re all long gone from this world we’ll pick up the pieces and rebuild. Large towering structures that scrape the sky. We’ll immortalize your viciousness in memorials and cannonize your victims. We’ll teach our children to speak your names with shame, but also to stand proudly over the fragments of bone you left. None will venerate you. You will remain for all time despised, forsworn, reviled.

This I promise you. By the green of the spring, this I promise you.

February 5th, 2010 by Hoopleton

Yes, then always as before, as the rain, as the snow. We live in a strange world you and I. Perpetual winter in the flat of the lakes and upon that a perennial sheet of clouds. Further up I imagine there are stars. Pushing further entire clusters. Galaxies. Eternity just a bit out.

It all started out like this.

The various fragments were arranged. Rules were drawn. Computations made. Projections forecast. Plans agreed to, huzzahs exchanged. Somewhere in the deep dark bowels of the universe someone laughed.

It didn’t take long for it all to fall apart. And my precious allmighty God was it spectacular.

What are you doing standing in the rain, darling? You asked me.

Missing you, always. I replied.

I’m right here, you can come closer, you can hold me now.

In a minute, for now I’d just like to stand here and take you in.

Here it begins again anew.

Out of stagnation. Decomposition. Putrification. Disection. Deconstruction. Into rebirth. Growth. Cultivation. Prolifiration. Transgeneration.

It’s as it should be. Chaotic. Formless. Perfect. You and I braced against the endless winter. No projections. No plans. Fixed only as a dotted line upon the map with mile upon mile ahead of us. Eternity just a bit out.

January 31st, 2010 by Hoopleton

I can’t bring myself to remove the coffee cups or fix the covers on my bed. I sit on our couch and read my old journals thinking about the trips we’d take. I smell you in the cushions, I see your shadow thrown down against the floor. I dream about reversing time again, if only for an afternoon. I’m not doing well today. I can’t seem to breathe since I saw you last and the pain is getting more intense. I don’t know my worth. My place. And my imagination runs screaming. I’ve never had darker thoughts than this. For me. For you. For us. I won’t live without you. I know that now. My heart may beat but I won’t be the man you know. I’ll drift without purpose. Aimless. Undefined. Empty. Shattered beyond recognition. Weak. I’ve given you all my strength. To protect you. Help you. Set you free. Until you return I have nothing left.

January 26th, 2010 by Hoopleton

The temperature drops to well below freezing. The sky is the same overcast steel grey it’s been for weeks. As the train follows the track into a sharp left turn I can feel the wheels shift slightly. I imagine them slip. Six cars full of evening commuters falling off the elevated platform, tumbling into the street below.

This is not the same day that it was yesterday. So many todays and never a tomorrow.

That’s just the way it goes.

For a hot minute I’m lost in the rhythm of the tracks. The idle chit chat of the women sitting behind me. Of the nearly undetectable static churning out of the intercom.

We’re in week three and I feel like I’ve known you for years. I almost, nearly, miss sleeping, eating, functioning as, I would think, ordinary people do. I like that you never drink the coffee that I buy you. I like your hands warm.

No, this isn’t the way I wanted us to meet. If I had it my way we would’ve met when we were children. So we could’ve grown up together. Been innocent together. So that I could’ve always been writing of you. Dreaming of you. Being of you.

I want your head pressed against my shoulder when I fade to sleep tonight and your eyes on me when I wake in the morning. I want you here on this train with me. Buried halfway between imagined catastrophe and the ambient noise that consumes me.

And I fear constantly that my passion for you will push you away from me. Will overwhelm you. So I take a step back and again find myself alone. Missing you. Craving you. Desperate for you.

The train pulls tiredly into the station. Sparks explode and people gather at the doors. As I grab my bag and button my coat I glance back hoping for some trace of you. But instead you smile, kiss me on the cheek and say goodnight. So I step outside, braced against the steel grey cold.

January 26th, 2010 by Hoopleton

Lady Love by Paul Eluard.

She is standing on my eyelids
And her hair is in my hair
She has the color of my eye
She has the body of my hand
In my shade she is engulfed
As a stone against the sky

She will never close her eyes
And she does not let me sleep
And her dreams in the bright day
Make the suns evaporate
And me laugh cry and laugh
Speak when I have nothing to say.

January 24th, 2010 by Hoopleton

It always seems to get colder when you leave

Me, standing on the sidewalk, hands in my pockets, my collar turned up

I can’t imagine it’ll ever get easier to watch you drive away

Even years from now with countless days behind us

When I’m grayer, you freer, bound ever tighter together

Then too the sun will go out of the sky

Then too again the cold will rise

You, my dearest most cherished friend

I wait and wait and wait

January 22nd, 2010 by Hoopleton

It was true but only in that the lights had all gone out and there was nothing else to be done but to feel for the walls in a mad attempt to find the exit.

So I crossed the floor, the biting taste of wine still on my tongue. It was exactly as I had imagined it. Nothing in the black beyond a faint blue glow emanating from off the surface of the hardwood, coiling as if steam.

I thought of her immediately, trapped somewhere as I was half a world away. I thought of her hands. Her long nails. The precious scars on her forearm. Her probing eyes. Tussled hair and the silence of everything that lay between us.

I called to her and waited. And waited. And waited.

Of all the little dyings none was worse than this. My voice snatched up and tossed down broken against the wooden floor.

I shook myself and imagined the city crumbling down around us. Walls enveloped in explosions of dust. Firestorms. The smell of burnt paper. Ash coming down in waves.

I thought, beyond this happening there must be others now, of similar, possibly, I dare hope, exceeding grace.

But all there was, was the rough surface of the wall and the absolute absence of her. Black and a faint blue glow emanating from off the hardwood.

I stood without moving. Numb to everything but my pulse and the thoughts of a future that remained stubbornly out of reach. And so I brushed the dust off my shoulders, paused and began again.

Long ago there was only the shimmer of trees and the groundswell of earth rising up from the trenches of the sea. In that place we were together free from all sin. You looked at me then and ran your fingers across my cheek. All that was of you and all that was of me. Corporeal being and celestial hymn. There we were free, caught up in the garden of paradise, no walls, no floors, no bounds of flesh.

This too I remembered. Broken of spirit, bathed in darkness, longing, yearning, pleading. This too was me.

January 21st, 2010 by Hoopleton

In the not unlikely event that this world will simply explode in the not too distant future, please remember the following:

Age was not synonymous with wisdom.

Youth was not squandered on the young.

The politicians are the ones who got us here, but don’t forget we elected the bastards.

Democracy was always a myth.

The human animal was doomed the moment someone decided, and yes it was a man, that anything belonged to him.

Yes, we did evolve from apes.

No one ever really believed that the world was flat.

The Mona Lisa was overrated.

Socialism was not evil.

Being gay wasn’t either.

Capitalism was just as corrupt and oppressive as Communism, in many ways it was worse.

God never took sides.

Marshall McLuhan was right about everything.

Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf and Ann Sexton did not commit suicide, they were murdered.

Christopher Columbus, Henry Ford and Walt Disney were despicable human beings.

Jesus never wanted anyone to hate anyone else.

When Alfred, Lord Tennyson said that it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all he had absolutely no idea what in the hell he was talking about.

Love could conquer anything but itself.

Everyone and everything dies alone.

We never needed any of the stuff we bought.

We were all weak and deeply, deeply flawed.

Yes, we really could have done anything we wanted.

The death penalty was the first sign of madness.

Reproductive rights were never about murdering anyone.

There were no good wars.

Christianity was wrong.

So was Judaism.

So was Islam.

So was every other religion on the face of the Earth.

We all had blood on our hands.

We all meant to do it.

I meant to do it.

I meant everything I said.

I loved you from the first moment I saw you, even if I didn’t know it then.

January 16th, 2010 by Hoopleton

Tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me how do I get through this?

How do I not see you?

How do I not talk to you?

How do I not cherish you?

How do I not write everything for you?

How do I not write everything of you?

How do I not touch you?

How do I not hold you?

How do I not kiss you?

How do I not starve?

How do I not drink?

How do I not pick up the goddamn phone right now and call you?

How do I not run to you?

How do I not love you?

Please please please please please tell me and I might just believe you.

Please.