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.
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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.
Our shared experiences in the past seem to mean nothing to those reflected in the world’s window screen.
I watch them all hoping for recognition / reconnection while sister hurts and Sean struggles.
Steve is happy listening to sad songs which make me weep.
I want to tag myself in a million posts in every place I’ve ever gone.
Fuck this song. Fuck this.
Life changes us and you’re a stranger that I once knew or at least I thought I did.
I have pictures but they don’t seem to matter; they don’t seem nearly as real as yours.
I tell you the secret in the past but you are blind.
I dive for real love at the beach house with men that I trust while Lauren Moloko Hatchie St Vincent (actor out of work in the radio Dept.) decides the time is now to try to speak your true name amidst disarray antidotes, preoccupations with daysleepers and their creation… and now the meaningful nonsensical rhyming must begin as we fade away to nothing important:
I get a little blue as I listen to your tunes as I Facebook stalk your trek across the place I never knew…
And Sean is turning tricks paying rent by sucking dicks, and nothing really matters if our lives are candle wicks.
But I want to visit woman with the ghost out on the porch… want to live my life again when I am out of sorts…. want to read of witches as my fever threatens soul…
Your aura ghost echo (lost orca in ghetto) and only espresso can make us both whole.
He was here more than year; he was here for so long.
He was queerly sincere and shrouded in song.
He was there with despair in mysterious scars…
He was blonde and absconded from bright lights and bars.
But these words obscured are like gospel from me…
My words are not heard by apostle to thee…
Who worshiped and wept though you never knew…
How he stayed where we played as I fade into you.
Written by Jason Wright October 1, 2017
For Mazzy Star, Saint Etienne & the boy (now a man), who made them matter.
– ABOUT THE POEM – The title springs from a word I saw (Delirante) at random when I wrote, which means delirious, which is how I felt at the time. “He’s Gone” are lyrics from the Saint Etienne song “Like a Motorway”. There’s a guy I met in early 1995 in Michigan, named Steve Rink. We were never close but we had several friends in common, went to some of the same bars, read some of the same books and listened to some of the same music. We also hooked up once in an odd sort of circle jerk in summer of 1996. I don’t know him well, but for whatever reason he’s popped up a lot in my poetry, or at least my perceptions of him pop up now and again; I don’t feel like I actually know him that well. I’ve always found him attractive, but I find lots of people attractive and there are many suck people that I never write about at all. So I don’t really know what that means.
When I moved to New York, or relatively soon after, Steve was living in NYC as well. We traded messages about possibly hanging out, but it took me years to adjust to being here. In many ways, I’m still adjusting. And I also struggle with connecting with people. If I’m at a place, talking to someone in person, I’m very good at this. But on the phone, via text or email or whatever, I really suck at making things happen. And so nothing ever did. We were friends on Facebook though and he’s always been tapped into music that I love since I first met him. I loved when he posted about this or that piece that I didn’t know, because I knew that it meant I would most likely love it as well.
Before Steve lived in NYC he lived overseas somewhere. I don’t even remember where. I only knew because before Facebook we were friends on Myspace. He married a man, whose name I don’t remember. There was a video of the wedding and them dancing to “Fade Into You” by Mazzy Star, which struck me as perfect. Years later, when he left New York, he posted a video of Saint Etienne’s “Like a Motorway”. And that’s where some of this springs from.
He doesn’t seem to be on Facebook anymore. He’s off being a serious whale watcher / conservationist / photographer. From a far, I’m happy for him. I’ve heard from several friends in Michigan that when he’s in our old stomping grounds that he’s on all the apps. Good for him. Good for them, I guess.
What I’m saying, I think, is that I wish I knew him better. And I miss having music cues from him, because he really did listen to the best shit! But I’m happy he’s out and about doing his thing and I hope he’s happy.
Four of us there; though it’s hard to believe: Bald Jason, Paul and Darla and Steve.
The latter I stripped in Ann Arbor fountain before baring flesh pressing into his bottom; concealing our pact (which they labeled obscene) and that this healing act had in fact made us clean.
The nerve that in public made time seem to end:
Perving the lovesick with crime through the lense of twenty-one years flashing by in a blur…
The party that wasn’t for the people we were.
A moment of lust that had built beyond reason, Momentous trust in the shadow of treason, A moment of courage acknowledged and shared, Encouraged by touch though we weren’t prepared for the judgment of strangers and friends left outside, as we puzzled through riddles with longing our guide, But licentious struggles are seldom rewarded, For all our successes we may have been thwarted… For the world gazed in fear as if love were contagious… Our fumbled premiere saw us stumble toward greatness.