Project Thought Bomb

1-7-07: Kiss

2007-01-05T09:11:00.000-08:00

There is a time for us.

Fingers making dimples on skin

naked backs, beginning sin

Our bodies are lines, we do converge

to the sweetest place

a breathless space.

You sigh and tremble.

I use my mouth to hunt your grin

and close my eyes against the spin.

I love the way it makes us race.

We find new skin and curves to trace.

On dance floors, bedrooms, a front porch,

heat enough to start a torch

This is what I think of, wherever she might sit…

soft small lips

athletic hips

It's not a thing I'm ashamed to admit.

12-31-06: Destinations

2007-01-05T08:09:00.000-08:00

Somewhere there is a pair of Dutch backpackers who spit their words out in ugly, throat-clearing sounds spiced with English swear words, and I hope their destination is a filthy, uncomfortable place where they might come to their senses and feast on the kindness of strangers no more. For a brief period of days in Costa Rica the back of their sun-bleached heads seemed to be always in front of me, no matter where I went. They spoke of drugs, parties, and the vaginal qualities of recent sexual conquests without regard for volume; it took all of my self-control to let it all roll off me as I walked by on my way to the bathroom at midnight, or waited behind them to get food from the refrigerator in the morning, or any of the myriad random places I found them when I least wanted to.

This is not a pleasant memory that I wish to return to, so instead there are other destinations we should discuss.

Like remembering the wonderful, soft warmth as I ran my fingers over a girl’s thigh en route to her underwear, or

the place where I slept in Africa out in the open, under stars so tremendous and curved that the sky seemed endless, or

the space between preparation and performance, like the last breath before the opening whistle at a soccer game, or

the time on stage between the spotlight and the audience’s applause.

You know what I am speaking of.

It’s a feeling deep down in your stomach of swallowed tickles that spreads into a light, airy happiness after the fact.

This is the destination I am looking for.

I want

the euphoria of the unknown

combined with the comfort of waking and stretching like a cat,

nuzzling its head against your palm on the wooden front porch.

12-24-06: Change

2006-12-28T18:48:00.000-08:00

No two people wake up exactly the same. We start within ourselves, simple thoughts and muscles under the sheets as we open up wide and yawn into a new day. Time passes this way. We start within ourselves and then move out into the world. Crusty, sticky night is still there at the corners of our mouth and eyes. We carry parts of the day before on our backs, the weeks before, the months before that make us who we are, and when we reach milestones in our burdens we stop and think.

The end of the year is like that. People kneel down in their minds at the altar of change, and pray for some semblance of control over the future. They touch their foreheads to the cold floor and chant for control over change.

We do not have control over change.

If we did have control over change, if I had control over change, I would not be sitting in my brother’s apartment in sunny plastic dirty Hollywood, listening to the answering machine. A law office has called about my mother. This is nothing new, and I assume it is bad, because with my mother it is always bad; she is always hounded to the corners of the earth by incessant pain and trauma. She is forever walking on the razor’s edge of breakdown, and when she slips it is those of us who love her that are cut. Sometimes she calls, drunk in the evening again, to ask about how my day was. I really know this is just a setup. It is a trap to enter the game we play, where everything starts benignly and then descends through all 15 or however many rings of hell there are into a special place where we once again fight like we always do. It always comes back to marriage and divorce, men, race, money, my failures as a son, the world’s failures as a place of happiness for my mother. Even when I’m not talking to her, even when it’s just lawyers calling about business they can’t talk about, just please can we talk to your mother, even then I still hear the conversation I would have with her. It’s always the same conversation whether it’s over the phone, or via email, and it never ends happily.

Some things never change.

“She said you need to work on being more accessible,” my roommate told me, after talking with her friend about why I’m single, “But she’s crazy so don’t worry about it.” Her friend might be crazy but she’s right and I know she is. If I could control change, I would change that. I would take myself to the personality cleaners, where they could hang me on a rack and run chemicals over me, and I could come out the other side in a shiny plastic bag, waiting to be picked up. They could put me in a storefront window and I would sell like the hot Christmas item, out of stock after Thanksgiving.

Since I can’t control change, this is not what happens, and instead I’m waking at 3 am in the middle of the week wondering how nice the night was for other people, or dreaming about that time after graduation when I laid in bed curled up next to a girl and we fit together like pieces of a puzzle, and I spent the whole night exploring her curves like they were petals of a flower that I would never dream of cutting out of the garden. We were both gone in the morning.

Some things never change.

But some things do change, and that is what the New Year represents to me. When I’m sitting or standing wherever I’m sitting or standing when the ball drops, it will be a chance, like every day is a chance: to be happy, or sad; to step forward, or back, and I will continue always searching searching searching. I will search for myself out among the sea of people, I will search for ways to seize change and guide it under my hand like Caesar with an army, so that perhaps when the time comes again next year, I can stare back at the magnificent catastrophe behind me and smile, a little freer from want.

2006-12-28T18:47:00.000-08:00