Not Going To Dinner With The Poets, Coming Home And Writing Instead

The woman up at the front of the room was giving me diamonds, I swear I could taste them like drops of white lemon in my mouth. Dinner! Everyone said “Dinner! Let’s all go out for Dinner!” And I thought, “Huh, Dinner, I like it, like Dinner, as much as the next mouth.” But there was no way I could not go home to write after that. There were 'possums on the roadway in my head and I imagined squirrels and songs I could write. I wished for to be something other than I am for a long time, long and long, waiting for the way the eaves open upward and windows everywhere, nothing not-alive and nothing to be ashamed of and just me and opening up my worldhead, the mother up in front of the room, reading poems about her son the Pisces and I am a Pisces and I was her son for a moment, though she might have been even younger than me, but she was all mother love in the world and I felt good about it, remembered reading and getting kissed on the forehead and the cheek, wishing to be alive forever in that love, and also remembered breaking up hard with a woman I loved like a mother and even called her that accidentally a few times...But it was no accident, I was looking for a mother, for someone’s sustenance, direction, piles of warm and wonder to hold me in my lonely post-traumatic, even-now-traumatic life, and found myself lost when we broke, when she left for another fellow, another bloke, who needed no nurturing the way I needed. So she said goodbye I’m kissing another guy, starting a life with another gent, and I dropped the phone, put on my running shoes and ran out into the rain, went running in the cold winter rain for hours, didn’t care about ninjistic ice brain that kept forming and re-forming, didn’t care about lungburn, legs getting wobbly and wanting to cry. (But I ask you, how the hell do you let your fuckin' legs cry when they need to? You just freaking can’t.) And I came home from that run and was alive to the moment of insane cinderblocks packed into my chest (a wonder of hurt), a bullet traveling slowly through me, barbed and empty, made of desire, bursting out my back, leaving a great canyon behind. And I sat down simply on the floor to get contact with basic breath, kernel of non-pain. No good, no good, no good, still sad me in realm of thought, expiring alone, alone in the world, lonely forever. Sitting for hours, untalking. And then my mom, my heavenly Ma, small-framed and thin, Laurie, with love stronger than thought, drove over, walked in my room, knelt down, my Mother Saint of Grace, held me in her long little arms while I followed my breath. Me crying, shoulders shaking in her hands. She simply held me, protected, man in her arms. Now, thinking back on that moment, full decade ago, more dreamlike than anything else, I remember dimly the pain, but remember the love like fire, live fire all around me, strong hearth emanations coming up from generations of blood and mothers. And tonight, as I write this, the desert is outside, alive. And as that poet read to me from her poems, another saintly woman, I could tell, I simply knew, I could feel my heart go slippy and make contact with inner world of motherlove again again again. Good, and I was drinking Coke. It was good, it was sweet, it had a mystic tinge, nothing about me felt wounded, nothing was behind me, sinister or full of fear, I was aware of the wicker basket at the back of the room, aware of the painting on the wall to the left, with an athlete, face fixed in severe gaze of striving and yearning. A feeling of mercy filled the room, a feeling of holy mixing with whatever hells the listeners were in and it was okay, no plague of desire, no writhing frustration, even though poems of longing and poems that hinted at the way the world could be if we could lead with our hands instead of our balled fists. Nobody was sad, nobody’s body rebelled against her, the future there was promise and the air was easy to breathe. I could feel my legs talking to the hair on my legs. They were happy together. Which was strange, since they never had a conflict or a problem before. But tonight they were appreciative of their relations. O, I suppose there was some yearning, some sense that people everywhere had tears and busted up lives to keep living out. But up there was a mother, Hoa Nguyen, pouring out her mere everything for us, and she knew and we knew and even in the midst of a city (collection of lost souls living close to feel like the fire’s not far) we were connected, we felt, or at least I felt, like I inhabited a connected body. Body of work and body of light. Body of feeling. And if I were to die today (I almost died last night—ah, Christ, I’m always almost dying, so much so that to hell with the whole concept. Who needs it? Who needs it? Not me, no death. Like Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, famous death guru, says, after you spend enough time next to the dying, you know. Know it’s all bunk, all mirror-myth. No Death. No End. Reepicheep knows it, has gone beyond fear. Just moving onward. Who knows where? No worries, just a way, una selva oscura, a path into the woods, no trubba, trubba not, zanting in the minced moonlight, all eyes peering out from some teary cold head-world, and even though I almost went under a car last night, tonight I am willing, open up my arms. Right now, no shit. As I write this, no joke. I’m really doing it, really opening my arms, it’s good. No helmet on as I write this, no need, even though the night is full of things, full of ways to respire my last. I hope the next time I die I’ll die with wide open inner eyes, unworrying, inward-smiling, poems reeling forth quietly from my ears...Poem of the quiet night beyond whatever nutty way my body rings the gong.) it’d be okay. And I promise to write letters to the people of the world, this language we have, this love, this expression of the lost world that lies within us, we make it and frame it in such wacked-out ways. (Hey, that’s good. That’s okay.) And I’m no longer fearful of that part of myself that seeks something motherly in a mate, soft hands and compassion, it’s cool. But what of the dance, the extra-dance that utters softly in the night? That is not mother/son. Something else entirely, hey? Yes, though it’s soft it has a different kind of heart, a feeling of making close connections, good for everyone’s inner self, good for the body, good for the connection force, good for principalities of pleasure and the bright soft living inside illumination of holy connection between bodies, lover and lover, ah, you sense its quiet raucous power, ‘tis good, ‘tis mighty good. Green things grow green because of that pushing. Bodies? Hell, bodies are just containers. Something to hold our feelings for us. Something for letting them go, too.