Maine
Sometimes it
is no longer about someone else, but it is all about you and the distance
between you and your God. My God you cannot imagine, as I cannot imagine yours.
Not that I haven’t tried. It is an old habit of mine to imagine people’s Gods. Mine’s
mouth is a black Atlantic maelstrom. I tell myself not to go, but I cannot stay
because God is not within arm’s reach here. Baby don’t go. Pretty baby please
don’t go.
It gets
weird when I sing the song, both the Sonny and Cher parts in pink and blue at
karaoke in a lonely bar in Maine that smells of the ghosts of oysters and aged malt
vinegar. Maybe they were right and I was crazy. I should have gone to the
hospital and been diagnosed and medicated so my mind worked like theirs and I
could have been miserable with them, placated by TV and a cellphone and an
annual game. A Christmas morning and a tax refund. Fake love and a cigarette. A
mortgage and a car loan. Seasonal allergies. But you once loved the crazy part
that stirred in you that which had never been stirred. Or was that a lie? A
game? Temporary insanity? What do you love now? What moves you? The hope for
the Marlboro Man?
I was bent in
my youth and this is what comes out of being bent the way no person should bend.
I was abducted by aliens in my laundry room. Laying in lint and staring at the
Colonial Club Peach Schnapps bottle dad kept on the towel rack. My mind was
racing with thoughts of the universe at age 8. They gave me knowledge and a new
name. They implanted a crescent moon-shaped transmitter in my right index finger.
I regret
mistakes I didn’t mean to do, that I wish I hadn’t done. At times, things I did
seem to have been dictated by someone else. I blamed the devil. But more likely
it was those aliens who used me like a remote control explorer. If I cut off
this finger, they will have no power over me and I will be free as the seagulls
that line the cold beach looking for tiny crabs that hide in the sand. I never
wanted the life of a crab.
The beat
goes on. A letter of apology will not suffice in any ink or I would have
already written it, in blood or the ink of the Kraken. I wear it, my apology,
in my eyes and my lack of sleep. My posture isn’t what it used to be. This is a
truth I learned, from a man in a diner: "You can't be forgiven by someone who
doesn’t deem you worth forgiving, or your love worth salvaging. You're a
wrecked car and there're car lots full of brand-new ones and ones that've
been polished to look new. Welcome to the scrapyard. We're in it together."
And you
remind me of the seagull and I am a crab until I sing another song and it all
goes away for a moment. Drugs keep pounding a rhythm to the brain. Ladi-dadi-dee.
Ladi-dadi-da. A drunk woman offers to sing all the pink parts but I say to hell
with her and I tell her to leave me alone. She can sing her own goddamn songs.
I do not
regret love. Or expressing myself instead of squashing everything to be manly
or to play a superficial game with a human-being that I love. Detailed in men’s
magazines under: How to make someone love you by not caring about them. The old
heart-on-a-string trick. I have too much passion for civil service and the
suburbs. For an Ohio, without you. I love too much and care too much for you to
watch you drift away from me and mold into a form you buy at Walmart. To see a
truck in your driveway and work boots on your porch where we drank wine.
I am happy I
don’t piss myself or wear aluminum foil hats or collect cats or hoard junk. A
tiny house on the East coast sounds nice to me on white rocks and cold sand. A
condemned crumbling lighthouse with a spiral stripe and staircase. An old boat to fix up. To
sail away into the white foam-capped wrinkles of the ocean when the cancer gets
me and radiation and words fail. To that frothing mouth of God that opens when
I am ready and not when I am told.
If you understand,
you are on my wavelength. If you can smell the brine and feel in your soul the
waves and do not wear a lifejacket. If you do not then I was right once
when I said we were not on the same frequency. Maybe you already know that and
it is just a new realization to me. And there is a handsome man in a truck for
you, a Kevin Costner, the Marlboro Man with dirty work boots to leave on your
porch. So you are happy that I am only what is left in the bottom of a wine
glass.
I am in the
crackle of the AM and you are I Heart Radio streaming clear in FM. I am a lighthouse
and you are the cell tower. I am the sounds of flying saucers at 3 in the
morning with a coat hanger antenna. The reoccurring Sonny and Cher song in AM static
voice. You got me and baby I got you. My next song on karaoke when the haggard
woman’s Fleetwood Mac song mercifully ends.
I am in
another universe, or across this one. To die and to be born again and to play
the game of finding you and doing better to keep you. May that song play as I
am scraping the boat and spreading the red candy-apple lacquer to make new something
old that someone tossed out like me in the scrapyard with a torn-up fender and a
cracked block. Only to destroy it, but
to do so in its glory. I am an old boat.
Someone to
appreciate your individuality goes a long, long way, if you have individuality,
if not you needn’t that, you need only a someone to cohabitate and eat dinner
with and occasionally perform ceremonial rituals mimicking that which is
passion. I wish we could have danced in this strange karaoke bar, fish shack, or
at all in Ohio before I went batty. Before the aliens fingered me, their
glorious flesh and bone puppet. Just one dance. We never did, you know? We
never danced.
I wrote an
apology on a cocktail napkin with calloused and stained hands. Do you read it? Do
you listen to the flying saucers on the AM thinking of me? Of us? Or sounds of
my boat in the Atlantic?
Maybe I’ll be
back again someday, with nine fingers.
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