I was going to write to you about the nightmares you inspired but amidst distraction I scrawled: 2/27 and I decided to follow that path instead.
I do that now. I observe seemingly random behavior and allow it to take me somewhere unplanned until I reach the end.
“This is not the end.”
A bumper sticker on trashy artsy wall and:
“EAT MY PUSSY SO I KNOW IT’S REAL”
which strikes me as poetic and insightful, rather than profane… sad and beautiful until Madonna’s Sex Book Mix of Erotica starts playing and I dance myself to distraction.
The train is parked in Harlem where a desperate portion of Trump’s thousands are now kept in confusion, doubt and heartbroken tragedy: a trauma that will haunt them for all of their days.
Is this how they were shipped here? In crowded fear drenched train cars? Where have I heard that before?
His overcompensating tower shadows the city, forever tainting the old neighborhood of black spanish jazz renaissance…
How many other Cotton Clubs cross red, white and blue are infected with his orange sacrilege?
Written by Jason Wright July 2, 2018
Poem written but untitled on July 2, 2018.
Title given July 11, when Green Day’s “American Idiot” single was reported to have re-entered British charts in response to Trump’s upcoming visit.
Air conditioned train car is nearly empty but filled with conversation.
I wonder why it is that they talk so loudly?
Impairment? Desperation to be heard?
An aching need to be continuously annoying?
They’re young; perhaps mentally they are still in the noisy schoolyard and must scream to be observed in that wave of riotous infants…
Or maybe Mommy & Daddy never noticed them at all and they howl for attention, love and affection while Mommy drinks herself into a senseless stupor and Daddy lies forever six feet under unreachable.
Before I leave but after I wake there is an overwhelming terror; a senseless type of heightened stress triggered by my inner ticking clock, which never trusts and fears interruption.
After I leave but before I arrive there is inspiration, analysis and exploration, a journey into self where understanding will one day hopefully reside – this contemplation is nearly always external, as it’s flooded out of my brain down through my fingertips thumbtacked onto paper pages – an activity I have often despised which has become my truest salvation.
In the breazy 70 sunlight city streets of New York my indoor apathy is burned away to cinders… and I can smile at the rainbow swirls projected before me, which originate in last night’s misery once refracted through the murky depths, the prism of a cuckold’s constant lust which transform that sickening nauseating sensation into chemical reactions associated with sensuality; the impotent erection of the overstimulated yet never truly satisfied bottom.
The reasoning behind transitions is all but lust
– FUCK –
is all but LOST amidst an intensely brief panic when I lose track of my letters, memory once again escaping from the prison of my mind –
How could I have forgotten this horror?
Is this to be my future hell?
WRITE IT DOWN SO YOU CAN’T FORGET!
Time for tests and uncomfortable questions.
A lack of specificity resembles the oft forgotten pattern.
Not names but films, not train letters but direction…
This is NOT like THE ME that I have known until this recent phenomena.
Perfect score on memory test at therapist’s office though there is visual spatial strangeness – my cube doesn’t begin with a square and my clock is a Salvador Dali sketch:
“The Persistence of Memory” becoming an ironic and completely menacing title.
Nothing to worry about, she says and I hear these words, like poetry.
Tip of the Tongue Syndrome and lexical access occurs in stages…
I remain fearful but also amused, inspired and enamored with her decisional words.
Our time is up despite the continued ticking of my misshapen clock.
I play a numbers game in hopes of recalling the percentages, the statistics and rates and proportions of a love affair between two unknowns.
What is the sum total of a failed relationship?
There were seventeen summers before that summer when we met, and that was seventeen summers ago.
But we were both of us older than seventeen when we met and made love for nearly five hours, on the eighth day of the seventh month of the two-thousand-and-first year.
We spent nine weeks together; four of them happily.
I once waited seven days in his bedroom, reading five-hundred-seventy-six pages of “The Prince of Tides”… before I drove one hundred and forty-one miles, back to Ann Arbor and waited to be betrayed.
Betrayal arrived on my twenty-seventh birthday, the twelfth day of the eighth month, but I wouldn’t learn the truth for several more encounters.
On August thirteenth, which fell on the second day of the week, my stomach became partially paralyzed, and I’ve been sick every day since then.
Before he told me the truth, he sent me flowers, made love to me and tortured me with lies and abandonment… those flowers were like perfumed poison when I learned the truth and saw them wilting in my bedroom.
The last time we had sex was August twenty-fourth.
The first day that we met there were fireworks; beautiful bursts of poisonous flowers, omens which lit up our lives and then faded all too quickly… but our lust prevented us from seeing this prophetic truth as anything other than celebratory pyrotechnics.
Numbers are often deceptive because they don’t truly reveal the truth with the accuracy that they are ascribed; they don’t calculate the geometry of emotion or the calculus of grief and lust and shame.
Every number that walks through the door can determine our differential and satisfy our algebraic need for multiples; while concurrently erasing the totality of truth; simultaneous equations of salvation and destruction.
Numbers, you’ll learn, can be vicious… because numbers will often lie.
One year ago tonight you whispered into my unhearing ears
with the flick of your tongue across my lover’s desperate flesh
over oceans of thought, fear and lust you joined that which was mine while never knowing or desiring my anatomy.
You, who knew not to be yourself except reflected in strange foreign eyes which we have separately drowned in, we have shared that beautiful body.
I am nothing to you but an invisible partner who plagues not your existence, a ghost that is haunted by tiny little deaths which interred you both on sweet Budapest fabrics to the strains of Porgy and Bess.
You were musical phrases that created a distinct melody of an already exotic piece, a hunger I may yet understand but will never truly experience.
That night I was lost in your tonal pattern, deafened by an overwhelming silence which inspired want and hatred, pity and indifference, a longing that may never be satiated.
I say “your” though the stress was not singular – it was a harmony that brought me to tears, tore at my soul & ripped me apart, boiling me down to my essence.
You were a crucible by which all fear was melted away, an intersection in which, by way of paradox, he and I were joined in honest surrender, a yielding so keen that it’s wounding pleasure healed the breach, sealed the rift, and eased the strain until nothing could keep us apart.
A ride on the 1 train to “No Friends” operetta, 1 day after a ride on the A train filled with naked imaginary men… on the way home from the village where extraordinary naked men used to die.
This writing calms me after distressing Anna voicemail; a horrible miscommunication which I must correct.
Breathe. 18 stops to relax. I can message her when I arrive.
Now, begin again. Tell me about the men.
There were several fully clothed but naked men on the subway yesterday.
A sturdy father, a seemingly kindly grandpa man and a 20 something – all of them with beautiful, dark skin.
As a game to escape the crowded heated madness, I undressed them all.
I sized them up and I devoured them, before spitting them all out when studly sturdy father man vividly became a father again.
Though just after that happened he winked at me, subtly rubbed his crotch and sent me another sidelong glance; an invitation to continue.
Except that more than 24 hours later, 17 stops have flown by and I must away to my partner and friends, leaving my imaginary men behind as I immerse myself in the imaginations of others.
