Prepared for Spontaneity

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I peel myself off the stencil of my bed to bide my time and wander pilgrim-like

from door to door

job to job

“friend” to stranger

searching for what I’m told is validation

but what I’ve believed is life

and what he seems to experience as pleasure.

California calls me home

and tells the world we’re a happy couple

even though her other metamours

are far more fit, and sexy, than I.

She gets the weekly DP

while I wait

for New York, I suppose, though I often settle for Providence,

to text me back.

Child like, but not wonderfilled (afraid but unexpectant)

Los Angeles makes of me a meager martyr

suffering only as much as much as I can stand

“We’re not doing this,” I say

and that “we” creeps in

slowly making itself comfortable

but there’s just one of me,

as his ability proves,

with needs of so many,

at least a few,

if only because there are so many of you.

Nothing inspired nor ravenous

but this is how we discuss

and hopefully expose the beds under and the closets inside which

there were monsters

empty and unfamiliar

yet somehow we are not afraid.

This is how monsters work

this is how they get you:

you go looking for them

hunting ill-equipped

and ultimately you invite them in,

bait without weapons

breath without air

fear without deliverance-

Oh, I have caught myself

in a dance through the air and the

foolishness I called fabulous

that we now know is faggotry

and it has no place for me

now monstrous and mangled

-the two of us, me and my monster entangled

hiding in closets and clubs that

don’t belong to us

hiding in showers and under bedsheets

hoping that when we’re found

we won’t be asked to leave.

The morning after chirps again

this is all too familiar now

the dissatisfaction

this distaste for LA

pain-filled, or bittersweet, the morning always is

and was

stolen from a dream

where the morning was an end to

something, not an “and.”

Enlivening, the husk

prepares its daily bread

grateful to have food on the table

and teeth, if not peace, in its head.

One more dream:

howling puppies, blind and newborn

in a box

crying, the usual puppy cries

and I, finally a father

powerless to help them

not understanding, and less likely able

to provide what t hey need

much less what they might want

or think they want

or think they want.

So back to sleep

to choose my dreams

or let them choose themselves

a victim of my own predictability

my self-loathing and my lust and whatever else sells.

[buildingsroman]

'But let's be honest. As divine as they are in bed, a guinea hasn't got a heart! They are ruined by their women from the crib, adored, coddled, assumed to be gods. Sad they happen to be so handsome. The real lovers, alas, are Wasps like you and me, even though we're supposed to be the ones who are emotionally stunted- well, of course, we are as cold as fish in one sense. In another, we are the only true lovers. Let the Italians and the Jews wave their arms about and proclaim to be passionate, but they understand nothing, but nothing about love! They are show girls, my friend, and don't forget it! It takes a northern European to really suffer the pangs of a heartache.'

Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

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‘My only hope,’ he wrote in his hardbound ledger, resembling the account books of store clerks in the early part of this century, 'is with those men circling the fountain. They are my fate and if I wish to have Life, it must be with them. What is most remarkable, I have no choice. I who have never been constrained by poverty, disease, accident, am now constrained by this. God’s joke. His little joke. To keep us human. To humble the proud. And I have been so proud.’

Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

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The World Is Too Much With Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;— Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

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My partner at home is the pipe, my bonnie lies over the sea; If some other man makes him happy, what does that man make me?

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I’ve only got to try a little harder

and want it a little less

if only to land a little softer

so as not to make of myself that usual mess.

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“It was like falling asleep hungover, tossing and turning through the rest of his night trying to forget that he’d hate himself tomorrow morning. He read a page in the book he’d been reading. He wrote a page of the screenplay he’d been writing, every line lame with apathy and limp with colorlessness. The world around him, in the library at least, hushed itself and pressed in around him. The carpet, the waxy wooden desks, ornamented with initials of couples and kids with no respect for common property, the bookcases, full of plastic-sheathed biographies of men and women forgotten by all but a few biographers; the world in here enveloped him, each drop of a pen, each cough and each creak in a chair threatening to suffocate him, to squeeze some truth out of him that he knew, once it existed, would be all his own creation. He wanted to run, to smoke, to drive, until his legs or his lungs or his car gave up on him too, but so far all he could do was pop an ibuprofen and scroll through Facebook to gorge himself on his judgment for others’ shameless self-approbation and self-deprecation and tribal squabbling or incestuous congratulation, full of sound and fury, signifying, to him, the pathetic and shameful indulgence in his own self-loathing tonight, ultimately to his own detriment.”

[buildingsroman]

10/20/14

Driving backwards cross the country,

going back to where we’d been, 

I’m seeing all the country roads I thought I’d never see again.

I’ll make NY by time you wake 

so don’t wait up for me.

I can run every red light as long as I’m asleep.

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I'll look to like, if looking liking move; / But no more deep will I endart mine eye / Than your consent gives strength to make it fly

William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet

[s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s]

Friendly reminder, lest we lose all common sense and decency. The Ten Commandments are neither profound nor difficult, at all. They are meant to distinguish us from barbarianism and narcissism. They are basic rules for being a human—bottom line. You don’t even have to believe in “God” or read these terms “literally” to comprehend the basic principle of love at any cost and the very clear prescription for humanity. Don’t do as your corrupt leaders do. Don’t do as your corrupt celebrities do. Don’t do as I do. Don’t do as the world implores you to “get what’s yours.” You are not entitled to anything. The breath you breathe is on borrowed time. Your days are numbered. Take captive all selfishness and evil and be abundant in life! Eradicate your bullshit. This is the day the Lord has made. Do as kindness and love concede to purity and grace and gratitude. Love your enemies. Love yourself. Give up your life for your brothers and sisters. Be a servant and a steward and nothing less than a saint. The world is abundant and I am so happy to be in it with you. Amen! — Sufjan Stevens

[buildingsroman]

Stuck beside you in my car, stuck in an hour and half traffic jam on the ten east, staring from the driver’s seat at the endless, I realize this is how I want it, this is how I prefer us. I make assumptions as to why, assumptions about associations with our road trip westward from New York, when I first moved out here to this sunbleached, yellowing paper city without pedigree. Those 4500 miles stand between us and who we were, but those 2 weeks slip through our fingers as time itself grows smaller and smaller beneath these wheels. Why did I leave New York? Why did I leave you? The same reason of course: so that neither would have the chance to leave me first. I realize I like you captive, and I like our headings aligned, both of us moving in the same vector, in the same vehicle, at least until we arrive. I’m convinced sometimes it’s the easiness of listening to music, hoping someone else’s words do justice to the things we’ve said too many times in too many unfortunate ways. Your silence, or even better your singing, are the true companions. Your hand in my lap the only copilot. Convinced we were looking out the same way at the same destination, I love you in the car like the bugs love the windshield. I score the best of our times with the best approximation of my  best taste in music, though what’s best, especially for us, is always subjective. I realize those silent sing-alongs, our coasting hours, are always the most efficient route between point a and point b.

On the longer dustier highways between days with you and days with you again, I crank up the volume on a player-piano radio, and cradle a navigation system in my fingers. You are not here, and most often not where I am going. You too are journeying, elsewhere to elsewhere, and out of my control; hydroplaning. Others’ words run dry and mine are laid bare, my voice embarrassed. I love you here because it is the one thing you can only improve.

[buildingsroman]

“When did pursuing your ambitions cross the line from brave into foolhardy? How did you know when to stop? In earlier, more rigid, less encouraging (and ultimately, more helpful) decades, things would be much clearer: you would stop when you turned forty, or when you got married, or when you had kids, or after five years, or ten years, or fifteen. And then you would go get a real job, and acting and your dreams for a career in it would recede into the evening, a melting into history as quiet as a briquette of ice sliding into a warm bath.

But these were the days of self-fulfillment, where settling for something that was not quite your first choice of a life seemed weak-willed and ignoble. Somewhere, surrendering to what seemed to be your fate had changed from being dignified to being a sign of your own cowardice. There were times when the pressure to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive, as if happiness were something that everyone should and could attain, and that any sort of compromise in its pursuit was somehow your fault. Would Willem work for year upon year at Ortolan, catching the same trains to auditions, reading again and again and again, one year maybe caterpillaring an inch or two forward, his progress so minute that it hardly counted as progress at all? Would he someday have the courage to give up, and would he be able to recognize that moment, or would he wake up one day and look in the mirror and find himself and old man, still trying to call himself an actor because he was too scared to admit that he might not be, might never be?”

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