You were my lover until the night that you weren’t.
You called me Janet… in the green shaded sunlight streams (like a stained glass painting) where we ran naked beneath that haunted woodland canopy.
I, daring to travel to forbidden places which our fathers forbade… to pluck the rose whose thorns did prick, beading blood from innocent skin.
On that final night you called me Lynn… (my misspelled middle name) when I appeared naked before you on the edge of twilight forest storm clouds; there, where I was deflowered by a fairy queen’s decree.
It was there, in the shadow of such bewildering and bruising beauty that you abandoned me, never to return.
As I had been counseled, I held tight to myself when you would have let me go…
And being unsaved, I saved myself, even as you faltered and fled.
True, I haunted that place on the following, on the morrow, as I brushed past tree limbs still wet with last night’s cleansing rain.
I walked to the spot where we’d smoked; the remains of last night’s victims, the evidence which proved that last night’s disaster had indeed taken place… a world shattering event which we have never discussed.
That woodland fairyland is a cursed place which returns to haunt my dreams.
That night I had been transformed into many creatures, into many forms, burned away to nothing and reborn from the ashes.
Janet and Lynn united in a pairing you could not possibly conceive of.
And thus combined, and bereft of your touch, I stumbled into the morning to learn what we’d become.
You tell him that sex with me will be completely emotionless for you, or at least that’s what I hear without really listening, but what you truly said is that our sexual activity will be completely emotionless for US, but that’s not wholly accurate… because I will feel something; if I didn’t already feel something I wouldn’t even bother.
You say that people don’t usually FUCK their ex-boyfriends, which I find funny because so far, they’re the only people I fuck, and why not?
I’ve loved you for almost as long as I’ve known you and can’t / won’t force myself to feel nothing.
But there’s NOTHING threatening to others by this potential reconnecting of interlocking bodies, because while sex will ALWAYS be emotional for me, I also hold no illusions that my having sex with you will bind you to me, making you a prisoner to only satisfy my needs, to only service my pleasure…
Our FUCKING will not reintegrate us into some magical reiteration of our former couplehood.
The idea is preposterous.
As preposterous as truth and as honest as fiction.
There was a morning, a day, a hot afternoon where I thought my life would change… where my wandering had finally altered my direction… but it wasn’t meant to be. Perhaps every day is like this for others… but the day I am thinking of, the day of sex before the sermon, I believed that I’d finally arrived somewhere I was meant to be, only to learn across the years that I would seldom ever return, and I wish I would have known how special that time was, how precious those moments.
It’s altogether different yet somehow the same when watching you watching whales… when the music you share nearly kills me with it’s mournful beauty – giving me fever chills and death spasms before my fever breaks and I’m allowed to dance in the trance of our shoegazing dream pop.
In the fever all that could comfort me was the seemingly old but younger woman with the ghost on the porch… An echo of that first reading joining my pain across two different eras.
3
The first would have been discovery, and on the very brink of puberty as I stumbled through that sea of trees to find a validating fiction.
And now the feeling: brotherly, yet still cherry stink of nudity as I’m humbled by our deities to bind an animated friction.
And the proof it is not fair but the truth is he’s out there begging for money, trading sex for drugs hungry while the whales circle round us tasting sweetly table scraps.
And the lie if there is one is that life is a shotgun because life hasn’t drowned us baby please don’t go like that.
In snowcapped Vermont artists interpret MADNESS in nine songs that jangle pleasantly through my short term memory, where they fade away to nothing, save vaguely happy impressions of experiences I wish I could hang on to for longer than Ambien will allow.
Xanax RATTLES in my pocket as seemingly female child rearing occupant makes other passengers noticeably uncomfortable… the smell of talcum powder makes me think of boyhood erections and vaginal cancer.
The sound of “Kryptonite” comes from 3 Doors Down and I’m dragged back to San Francisco drunken backseat passenger ride from one unknown location to another. THE MAN beside me is wearing my black clothing, my leather collar, while I am wearing someone else’s dress…
What ever happened to that Dorothy looking shit?
So intimate to see him wearing my goth rocker drag while I feel the cool autumnal chill on unwieldy knees which have never felt more naked.
…My Head Is Spinning…
Gay gangster rap pours into my brain as latex allergy flashback rips me in half on preacher boy’s beautiful blonde cock…. and that last time was totally worth it.
The Midrin has thankfully done it’s ruby stained work; Thank you Peter Murphy (The Scarlet Thing is actually in me) and I’m dancing at the Kit Kat Klub where all orientations are surprisingly segregated when angry heterosexual cis-woman calls me a faggot before I turn to make out with her stupidly aroused boyfriend just to spite her.
Off the train and I stop at random village pharmacy for cough drops before Jumpin’ Jack Frost tells me we’re done: just 2 more meetings and out… I’m lucky it’s still Tuesday because I’m gonna need a drink.
“Do you want to begin?”
Back in the dress I wore so preacher boy could see me naked, and I have no idea that 18 years later, on the opposite side of the country, I’ll still be scrawling about him singing “Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered”, “When You Wish Upon a Star” and assorted unspeakable lyrics that he traced across my unguarded vulnerable ambition.
This part sucks but it’s just a draft and doesn’t need to be as perfect as Cocaine Sex in countless naked backroom dance parties… bodies writhing in dark congress, riding waves in darkened corners – pain, disappointment, lust & loneliness expressed in acid light, opium torture and heroin bliss.
Feed me water. Slake my thirst. Let them drink wine!
The pained expression as he wrapped his arms around his head, as if to hide from the words he knew he must say; the risk he must take.
The tears that fell from his beautiful eyes as he confessed that the heart of us had been lost.
The strength that I had never possessed in the past, unfamiliar as it surged to the fore…
Was it possible that I had built a temple out of my shattered childhood only to have him ripped away from me?
The way we barely breathed as we collapsed in random bursts of suffering, exquisite, aching pain of love gone wrong, gone sour, gone ignored too long and now barely recognizable.
We lay together that night, together, yet cleaved in two.
Yet we never degraded, never cursed, never accused, never, never, never completely surrendered to shame or fear.
This hardship, this torment was honest and brave, and long overdue; I know that now and I thank him even as I yearn for my other half.
For 10 days and 11 nights I have fought for the mere hope, the slightest chance that a lost romance might be resurrected.
I don’t want to be crushed by the loss of him or bereft of his touch.
I fight for my own survival with lessons that may save me, yet beyond myself I yearn for the forgotten look in his eyes, the curve of his lips, the taste of his joy, satisfaction, surprise and that virginal lust for passions met in kind.
I want to give him what in ignorance I have so long denied him, he that I treasure most, he that I cherish above all others.
His need, his confession, his longing has inspired a sea change within me.
And if he might only look there in my culpable remorseful eyes, perhaps he will find what it is that he can no longer find on his own.
With every glance I seek to say:
I am here. And I love you. And I am in love with you. And I curse the day that I ever made you feel you weren’t worthy of my best.
I will extend myself to the best of my ability, beyond what I have done for any other love, any other lover, any other man, woman, parent or friend.
This I swear with a glad heart.
For you have made me a better man, and a greater man than you would be an impossible quest that I would never dream of or wish to accept.
Find me Aaron. Find me.
I am waiting in the dark to lead us into the light.
The moments between us are filled with such stillness…
Cherished, Exchanged, Sharing our stories…
With chapters in common and frank allegories…
He gives it to me and I’m touched without touching…
He whispers to me and I’m flushed without blushing…
He leaves me with passion transcended to form…
The canvas is thunder; his heart is the storm.
The sea of emotion by these colors rendered;
the work of a man who never surrendered,
The man in the painting who’s insides are bruised…
Is haunted by faces that used and abused.
Some of the faces are drugs that he’s taken…
Others are ghosts that still leave him shaken…
Some are illusions, Others invented, Some are the sins that he’s never repented.
Others are faces of boys he’s not dated…
He thought that he had but they really translated into nights meaning nothing except what he’s losing…
For riches imagined and instrument moving…
The face is the horror of waiting untasted…
The face is my mirror…
The face of time wasted.
Written By Jason Wright August 14, 2011
For: Johnny Vaughn, who’s artwork inspired it.
Johnny V passed away a little over 6 years after I wrote this. He was a caring friend when I deeply needed one. He and I had shared history but his adventures had been with people who were only ever on my periphery and I cherished each and every story that he gifted me with. He was also a brilliant painter and gave me the work that inspired this poem, though I also put in as many references to his tales that only he might recognize. I’m gratified that he read this and had such a positive reaction.
