It's cold in here

Been around all these years, fuckin stacked like dirty dishes, no water in the sink, listening in the darkness to John Fahey, which is wrong if you feel like this, gonna do damage to yourself if you can't find another willing victim, though there're plenty of them about, without a clue as to what the hell is goin on, this walking uphill in a fog, ivoried bones around the neck, and now the year is turning cold again, and the apostles are loose upon the world, flat the seventh, flat the ninth, the apostles of doom, laden with their version of mercy, their version of the good life, which is, of course, death. We're livin in the fuckin antechamber of death. And it's almost time to give thanks. Let the cold come on.

And by now -- look at all these years, filled with so much joy and pain and love and hate, I mean I've been living haven't I? I've turned my emotions into the wind -- you'd think a lightbulb would've gone off and the One Big Idea that'd sustain me just a little bit longer would've come down the lightning rod and struck me in the brainpan. No such luck. Shit, there are so many ways of disappearing. Into oneself, into the bush, into work, into a baroque notion of heaven, into the memory of sexual longing. Whistling while you vanish.

When my love sang the Agnus Dei in G minor I cried. And what of my boyhood beliefs now? I remember the safety of the sacraments, the communion of blood, the fellowship of charity, indistinctly, through a scrim of watered-down myths. I walked the tree-lined streets of Floral Park -- a town populated by white Christians determined to live fair and square -- without a care in the world. Some would call it blessed, that state of pure potential, the skinny blond boy in the early sixties, before the terrible griefs of adolescence, walking along with his butterfly net, looking for a certain swallowtail. As though he knew what he wanted. As innocent as a lamb to slaughter.

My hair is white, my chin is glass, my eyes go all fuckin misty listening to June Carter Cash sing "Keep On the Sunny Side," without a clue. Clueless. Ah, the pure products of America go crazy -- imagine how little imagination it takes to believe the poetry you read in your teen years. No, not enough to build a life on. Whenever I see an old person walking uphill, stopping every so often to catch a breath, staring at the way ahead, I feel a tremor in my gut and spasm of fear running down my back. Christ I still love this world, everything about it, but the cold is coming on.