johnny, angry johnny, this is jezebel in hell.

Today my friend came over wearing a stuffed animal backpack in the shape of an Orca Whale. We sat down and talked for awhile outside, smoking cigarettes and chatting as I watched her lovely hands fumble around his soft kidney-bean shape. Running her fingertips over the shortest coarse hair of his synthetic fur. Holding him close to her chest to fight off her need for a puppy right now. She left him with me when she went back to her car to retrieve something she had forgotten.

So, John (the name she had given to her compartmented companion) and I spent the next few minutes getting acquainted with one another after I had shouted "Don't be surprised if we fall in love while you're gone!" I cradled him in my arms and nuzzled against his negatived-panda-face. As I dropped my chin into his cushion head, I closed my eyes and felt all the unconditional love associated with these stuffed copains, the same sentiment one feels towards his old baby blanket or the emotion experienced at the discovery of forgotten pictures portraying one's youthful or adolescent parents.

I was reminded of Poof-Moo. The only stuffed animal I've kept, that I slept next to habitually. The stuffed cow you gave me on my eighteenth birthday that saw more love and adoration and use and abuse than any other stuffed friend that's ever come into my ownership.

I thought on my love for the Poofster momentarily and shut it off before I could understand the consequences of the emotion rising within me. Instead I remembered that he was sitting up in a storage compartment, in the dark, in solitude (somewhere I never would have left him a few months ago) as I sit out in the sunlight and in fresh air far away from him. In my new life. Where there was no longer room for Poof-Moo much less the memory of some boy I once loved whom that adorable cow represented. Rather than musing too long on what it means to have to constantly reshape my futurevisions and pasthopes as I come of age, I pondered on how much so many of us invest on simple sentimental belongings. The shit you can't get rid of that you keep in the attic of your house or keep nestled in the darkest, dimsal, dusty, cobwebbed corners of your mind.

So whether it's her in some antique piece of jewelry, or my father in an outdated set of keys, or old friends in photobooth pictures, her in a snowglobe, him in a record, or you in some stuffed animal or travel journal or your old clothes, there are just some things I can't throw out, no matter how many spring cleanings I go through. Everything important just ends up sittting on a shelf or in some dusty darkened cobwebbed corner.

why do I persist with you?
 my dear, sweet, beautiful  endless lover?
                          


why do i spend hours decoding your
                        
Lost Abstractions?Puzzle Paintings?





Or try to decipher which words are what?
I spend hours, until my eyes bleed from straining...
and while i attempt to understand your grave messages,
i am alone in my head thinking, 
Did she ever learn to write correctly?
Why can't I read this?
     She is so brilliant and her thoughts are
obscured by her lazy hand.
                Is that an 'f' or a 'g'?


I've spent hours buried in books trying
to translate your passionateprofessions        
       
 
         flippingthroughpagesfastandfull




Or is her Italian as bad as her French??
          I wonder ambiguously.




and at the end of it i'm just as
         d u m b f o u n d e d as when i began
and am only more ingtrigued by you
        and more in love with my death dream.



Is that how it goes, Lady Vertex?
Grand Duchess of Pivot? Princess Pinnacle?
              Matron of Metamorphoses?


When something must die,
does it have a long, detailed,
      colorful, picturesque, fantasy
  of being your otherworldly Isolde?
         or whatever form it is of you
         that they so ultimately desire
          (maybe somewhat) irrationally?


   maybe I ...


Or maybe you're just a mortal distance.






I, immortally speaking {endlessly},
 sweet loathesome Gatekeeper of Tragedy,
         laughing through tears, would sit
night after lonely night, during some grey day or other,
              at the apartment most likely ---



          the times i couldn't reach you i would smile
wholesomely and virginally, rag doll legs hanging over
some chasm somewhere, eyes outward, gleaming blissfully,
that you were just out attending to your ethereal business,
leading dying somebodys to wherever it was they were
supposed to go (because it was said that he
went part of the way with them)

     (whereveryonemustgo)

     so that i could think as little as possible on the truth,
     that you were clamboring over hedges,
     crawling over pavement
     or stumbling through alleys
                                             
                                    jonesing for a fix.

    
         (childofrollsandrailroadtracks)

    

         or perhaps, as they say,

                                Waltzing with Wolves ...






See? Even if i do love you the way you ...

it would mean nothing.

Because our bond,
however unimpugnable, is as transparent
                    as air or hallucinations
             or delusions or faith.

("That's when I knew that I could never have you,
I knew that before you did.
Still, I'm the one who's stupid.")

Even when i offered my soul to you,
you graciously denied it
because, you say, "it could never be."
Well, then, Lady, FUCKING LET IT BE.
Or stop fighting this (defeatist)
losing fucking uphill battle
Because, don't you know,

    Mademoiselle de Mort,

               These days we weave are very short. (?)



Or we could just leave our love in some other
dimension of surreality.
Where you, Dame Death, are but a Peter Pan
fighting off Captain Hook for his Wendy.
To at least lead her away from the corruption
of an interesting sounding story,
and take her far from Neverland toward
the second star to the right
                

                         first thing in the morning.




Maybe that's how this dream must end -
in this centrifugal continuation as you


           Pan[.Death]


swoon spiritually over some saddened dichotomous gatekeeper

(Lucifer's coveted concubine),

and you'll sit, smoking, on a spiral staircase
        that leads nowhere but into the trunk of a dying tree.
And we'll both weep over the other's Immortal Duty.

and i'll waste away quietly in something like purgatory
      with a chain on my ankle, leaning against an iron gate
in the fog of the underworld,
 as beautiful and decorated as Gweneviere,
    sobbing over a monstrous mutation of le main ---

and while the Suicides moan at their own mutated body parts
 dangling from their branches like sick ungrateful
                            and strange fruit, i will,

at the dirty coarse rope protruding through my pulse palm,
    with a rusty silver key carelessly tied to it.




(although i am quite aware
that none of this is really  h e  r   e  n o  r t h  e  r e .)




But don't worry, Fair One.
You won't be able to hear my wailing woes
because he has already managed to take out my voicebox.

                              (You did see it, yes?)



 (at the beginning of time he gave it so cunningly to Pandora,
   so that i may never resign from my unearthly infinite vocation.)




and you will sit, helpless, smoking, watching from afar ---
and when you're not too busy fucking, fighting, or fixing,



you will clean The Dead off my battleground
and turn the world white at the end of each calendar year
because you know that Tragic Death
is so much more difficult to rectify.



and the pretty little glittery pathetic
Paramour of the Prince of Darkness
will mourn over her every release
and at your every
Departure.Return.

all this talk of dreaming is fine and sweet... (Part Deux)

your iambic pleas are not enough for me
although they are described so prettily
of course have i desire for other beauties to transpire
for other paths untraversed, not destroyed by our past's fire

of course i long to hear your softsadloathinglows
of course in all my sweetness have i want for numbing blows
from your split-tongue wetness caving in
bricks of existence crumbling thin ...
of course i need to see you (as nice as you seeing me might have been)

but a few expressions of dolor tossed back and forth
between two abel-bodied beauties with brief smiles and pressing duties
("he's pleased to meet you underneath the horse")
do not equate a year and a tribe's worth of ambiguities.

i'd love to put this behind me in a fashion that is whole
that is not part sadness, part evil, part regretting (or, "status quo") -
for i know the ways in which i mourn and cry and grieve
that, despite whatever happiness, might still lie beneath

so you can walk away from these stories we've created
that are too far, too deep, too long in me embedded -
and great. you've succeeded in a dimension of surreality
from which i will never flee, because they are much too much a part of me

i cannot stand at your side and abide
violences and sick stuck words
and vanity sucking the both of you out of your hides
while i know it's most absurd

for i remember how the two of you loved(?) before
you crawling to their every beckoning call
and my pleas for you just washed ashore
but i suppose i was nothing after all ...

i cannot stand and stare at you helplessly here
while i watch you wither and more bruises appear
regardless of how much you may say things might change
i can't imagine that habits can be that much rearranged

i cannot look toward your marigold eyes
and watch the darkest circles form where my snowflakes might lie
and most of all, i must refuse
to be further enraptured by a game i will always lose

i choose to no longer be a ragdoll of yours, or mine, or his
in this, always and forever our most languorous drift
for once you appear things will remain as they are.
talk after liquor and more poems won't straighten the stars

after all this writing and reading and longing, and repeating,
what more is there to sort than this?
to crush or not to crush, to bleed or not be bleeding,
is it you who's now forgotten the spark in our kiss?

perhaps things will evolve with the passage of time
but the pain i hold dear is indelibly mine.
for as much as i would love for us to be together (un)seen -
the sweetness "won't last any longer than my favorite dream."

the end is very fucking nigh

what tragic misunderstandings have transpired
such muddy messages traveled through these wires
two ships passing in the night -
well, i guess, didn't your parents name you just right?

i doubt at your birth they recognized what could be ...
a possibility perhaps that they made you for me
and mine me for you
on a christmas so blue

perhaps the stars(!) forgot to make something that fit,
so a year later they had to backtrack to make up for it.
sadly, they also forgot what was what and who was who
so they made me imperfect enough to not quite complement you

so on that fateful christmas day
they threw a spoon my parents' way
or perhaps it was the clumsy stork
that merely overlooked your need for a fork

so may we not nestle safely in a darkened drawer?
stir each others' coffee? get bent together on a kitchen floor?
but do not let my confusion anger you,
would you rather nothing over all this ado?
let's just keep shooting these criss-cross'd arrows that never strike
to leave some literary glamour in our strife