living on used time

when it has been years since you felt rain, not that you have gotten caught in the rain, running to the building to the meeting to the house to enclose this shelter of everything, enclose it like a blanket around your skin, so pink as it would have been if these elements caught that long-awaited kiss

just that you have not stood and felt it for awhile, for minutes that are no longer minutes, when those red slashed digital digits are not a mind's eye away but centuries in seconds and time is time, waiting to be prolonged, not forgotten

i remember ....
i remember being descriptive, holding each moment like a loin cloth over my most private places, my deepest wonderments of life, moisten the edges with tongued fingertips, these words constructed like webs i used to stumble over in the forced forgotten lands of a diseased gandfather's farm ...

where hiding was a given and being inside was a right of passage for the old ones with all the facial composure (i know now this gestural emptiness)

when sensitivity and over-stimulation was cause for unfolding, not regressing, not a quiet awkwardness, where words fail and gestures are lost in ignorance to perception. when words were new not borrowed from used memories, over and over, an adage, a culture, a demogogue used over and through to a blank chalkboard black

lessons are always brightest in stark contrast

like how warhol was so overwhelmed with emptiness and repetition, how beautiful this thought void was, how like a child it must be, without prejudice because words and images no longer mean a thing here, in a saturated, beauty oblivion, how freely its associations could careen across moats and lavas of logic and reason to something deeper than thought or emotion could ever hope to caress

i feel sterilized, you know, ever since i (do you hear this me) left you ... ever since i left you with my guilt at the swinging backdoor to my burned book childhood ... it is funny how being with you felt so grown-up when i was there inside that child love haze ... how much---when i look back across the fuzz of mental distance---how really childish it was ... in the most endearing sense of course, memory made it ugly, not you ...

how much i left with you i still will not allow the luxury of reminisce ... how much i miss you, even as my conscious mind will tag its electric diodes on for added scare tactics, my own mind feeds me propoganda for comfort ... when i feel this breeze, when i remember this rain, when i hear the haunting metallic ring of cheap guitar strings and hesitant beginners' finger scraping, i remember you, brow furled, i remember us at lunch, yes so rebellious we would always sit outside and when it rained we ran to catch the sensation, cartwheeling in the graceless beauty of adolescence, when i watched you close your eyes and raise your head like the shining disavowed modern hero i thought such sentiments meant, let this torrent catch you shivering, face full, mouth open ...

i wish i could keep you there before everything else ... before flushed red hate and abandoned faith ... before meaning and intention ran for cover down that defensive hole we stuck our pinky fingers in, you know, the ones we swore we'd lose if we ever broke a promise ... how i see you and my old self in everything, only it is oblong and wavering now, like a great nightmare of a funhouse, every reflection is a distortion, and you run to the ones that show you the best illusion...

how i cringe, quite unnoticeably, when someone will respond to me, "you have pain in your life." as if this is a special phrase for me, as if it should not apply but somehow hits the apple in two upon my head when i blink to smile, when i grimace to smile, when i look away from my own habits i promised you and myself i would never fall into ...

i have fallen and stepped away from that train wreck ... yet, for some reason i keep looking back, wondering at the potential of letting it hit me head-on ... this self-destruction catching its own tale finally, falling into the mirror, the lake reflections i had lost so much to before, throwing myself into the sea, walking serenely head bowed under water to the river currents, letting myself feel the sensation of loss for once, for once

yet i walk away

under castle buildings and trip down fire escapes still ... jumping in afterthought puddles because it should mean something ... i just can no longer remember what ...