Oh What a New-Sound-New

When I was little, we used to put butter on our lips and pretend it was lipstick. Now I put lipstick on my lips and pretend its butter.

Now I watch my baby boy climb the side of his crib and yell out to me when I put him to bed, jumping and pounding and turning red; it breaks my heart to see him this way. Of course, this is exactly what his behavior aims to elicit in me, if not consciously than as an unconscious survival mechanism - his distress rams through me all the loss I've felt over a lifetime. All the loneliness, abandonment and broken-heartedness I've ever experienced is contained in these cries and shoved at me for my perusal. But of course, he's just a baby and doesn't want to sleep. I want to sleep desperately, but this is not an interesting story. Perhaps the interesting stories cannot be told in this lifetime.

Perhaps they are not worth telling. There were one a million stories, ideas, memories (with passion!) but they all melted down. Is this a bad thing? Or should we go back there again -- to that polluted place of uncertainty, Binghamton, N.Y., where at least there were the crows. Black clouds over St. Peter's dome don't look so good, make the surrounding demons a shade more visible, more menacing. Love was a way of life, not just an apparition after a night of heavy night of drinking, but something that lived and breathed (the demons were there just the same). It was the only thing that melted away the cobwebs of evil that enclosed us and threatened to devour us all. This is the story I want to tell, but I'm afraid no one would believe it.

Break through. Step in. Can you make it past the noise? Remember your poetry -- do we still have a guardian angel, even though we're so far away from that cursed place?
It all got started back there, but the rhythm was so clouded and still is. We'd just hop on that train and ride it. Remember out in the nature preserve with the frogs and the orgy of mating salamanders and the mud -- good old brown mud that smelled pleasantly of rot and things earthly. From here all life had arisen.

Wonder if that long bridge is still there there across the long end of the lake, with that one enlarged part for just sitting, on which some other acid-crazed student had scrawled "JEEZIL LOVES YOU". Were were there in the fall, when even the ferns turned brilliant colors screaming on LSD, and I wanted so much to tell the story just like now. It was all there in front of us that day, written in the moss the rocks and the tall old pines with so much to tell. They were so much older than us kids, so much older than everything in that dark, polluted country. They shaded us and whispered tales of centuries past -- freer, happier times, before this land was destroyed by black smoke, factories, toxic waste and finally...college students.

But I just couldn't get this story into words, couldn't get the words down on paper, with its rigid lines running strait and narrow across the page. The stories came in colors, vibrant earth-shattering colors of autumn -- reds, oranges and yellows, they dripped down the page like beautiful people who've been struck by lightening and left everything else behind.

Why can't we ever keep the faith? Its that same fear that told us not to leave the forest that day, the same one that prevents us on this very day all these years later, from moving on with our destiny. That snake-in-the grass fear that burrows in and removes my mojo every time I feel ready to move on and get rid of this story once and for all.