And yet, the finality of the inner drought, this dreadful blend of acuity in the matters of detail and indifference has created a generation wherein people have an air about them that seem to matter more than any specific achievement. Perhaps they have a particular genius for passing as a genius. This is dilettantism and if the intellectual life of the American speaking world rests largely on dilettantism, for this is a talent found in every degree up to the level of those who really are highly gifted, in whom it usually seems, to all appearances, to be missing; then Man’s monstrous abandonment in a desert of illusions, his restlessness, malice, unsurpassed callousness, money-grubbing coldness and violence, all fully characteristic of our times, (same as it’s ever been, only our version), and by these accounts solely the consequence of damage done to the soul by keen, brilliant logical propaganda masked seductively at pretty amphetamine-colored speeds, Delicious Apple-like isexed up madness of marketeering devilment and dirty rat, Orwelian advertisement.  Simply put:  There’s a lot of people hurting out there and they don’t know how come and that really scares me.

*****

…..ONCE upon a time over warm bagels, smoked salmon and fresh fruit; in the picture home fashioned after a schooner; on the peaceful, strange Sound, I shared the warm, yellow wooden family breakfast nook with my mother.  It must have been a weekend with my father reading his papers alone just outside our conversation.

“She doesn’t love me,“ I told my mother.  “I think my heart is actually broken,.  I’m telling you, ma, it’s really broken., I can feel the break!”

My mother sipped her coffee and said nothing  She flipped her platinum blond hair with dainty brown highlights off her face with a theatrical shake of her head.

“How can you not believe me?” I asked.  “I can tell you think this is  adolescent psychodrama!”

“She loves you, “ said my mom., most matter of fact  “I see you two together every day.  She’s a lovely person and you better believe it, kiddo,  I know good love when I see it.”

“You’re wrong, ma.! I feel the loss coming for me, even right now just sitting here…I’m about to be ditched and when you see this before your very eyes, you just might cry for me.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you”

“Sunny, I don’t believe you,” she said and giggled because what I said to her often tickled her, “In fact,” she went on,   “you’re  full of shit,” My mother  then took a sumptuous bite out of a red Delicious apple.  This was not her usual language, but it was  curiously exciting being a part of it with her.

I took a quick pause to catch a sudden and fearful, breath and lamely told her, back –“You’re full of shit,” and no matter what, it felt immediately all wrong. Instinctively, I shifted backwards just as my father came bashing through the yellow swinging door, pencil mustache shimmering with sudden sweat.

”Don’t you ever!” he was right up in my face as I stood to match him and  looked down at his hamfist and saw it at the ready. This was another first.

Feeling knotty and confused and a strange yet not totally unfamiliar helplessness of a rubbery pawn as if being positioned for something I was utterly unprepared for. Thoroughly uncertain about knuckling-up, before responding to my dad, I glanced to my mother who sat regally placid and unmoved, still working her lipstick red mouth over the Delicious.  I’m sure I expected a helping hand but none came.  No paliative words of love from her, not this time.  No peacemaking   No protective caresses to my head.  No, “Don’t worry, baby, everything will work out all right.”  No,  “Walter, how many times!–”  Instead, something utterly other.

As my father stood his ground, nervously inching into me, leading with the width of his meaty pelvis, I was stricken by the expression of otherworldly reverie on my mother’s pretty blond face, lips slightly parted like a Madonna; a completely foreign mix of sound and vision — quivers.  Was she really delicately daubing drops of apple juice off her breasts with her pinky?  Matched in affect only by the tiny, quick pink wavery silk movements of the nightgowned, airy excitations skimming the sudden blush of her substantial  décolletage.

Certainly, I’d never seen such a thing ever  –  Oh, God, not so up close.

I split the scene, avoiding my father’s beefy shoulder as I skipped past them, bizarrely fixed on the motto of the 101st Airborne, Screaming Eagles, Vet Nam, 1966 – “Death From Above.”

Out of the house and didn’t slow until I’d hit The Sound where I sat at water’s edge with the swans, the ducks, the lights across the water, sat in late sunshine and in shadow feeling dead, as dead as I could have been.  Wishing all my dreams to be warm and sweet and from thereon in  imagining how if my love failed to tell me that she loves me, I’d simply sleep in peace until she comes to me. I stared down the willowy weirdness before me;  Nevermind that which had  just been left behind.      Well, I promise you, being capped at half-past almost grown makes for awful strange fruit when all else, has more or less fully ripened. And all this set down years before my current circumstances became my identity.

CHAPTER I — SHHHHHHHHH

THESE are the days, definitely, to keep an eye out. That’s to say, in my estimation if ever in the history of the whole world, now’s the time to let nothing pass you by, or else. There are problems to sort out, like the fate of the soul and so on because it’s all happening everywhere all at once, in spades, every minute of every day with volume like you can hardly believe, all the time. We’re being transformed, far as I can tell, so when I go, `Whatever happened to her?’ to me this is big. Well, I swear to God I’ve been looking. I’ve been keeping an eye out.

And the hell of it is, if there’s no love left anywhere, or more like it when that came down on me personally, I think I was transferred — my everything — over to this gigantic other place where I’m so shook-up stricken and then there, that’s where I get caught in a such a mean bag –I get stuck out in the cold and I’m lost: Unkissed.

I got this huge unkissed-ness thing.

And that’s really how I was dropped after all, and really how come I get to hear the sparkle is my bet, why I think I can turn discard into something so flush, (I swear to God I can do this sometimes), and because I’d better; or else like I said I’m just voided, and I get cold and lost and I am nowhere.

Truth: I’d sell my soul, my self one dollar at a time for just one chance, one taste, one kiss, one last touch from her, my Undine.

ONE moment there he was heaving sweat through a modern bit of healthy pumping iron. Fit as a fiddle,  “In perfect shape, heart of a young lion,” so he’d been told by recent Doctor checkups.

Hot as all get out, outside.  Guy got to sweating, suddenly bizarrely so; in a few seconds he was otherworldly drenched.  It seemed to him impossible for a man to unilaterally pour saltwater like that.  “Surely,” he thought, “something really off’s going on inside me.”  He recalled how on Court TV, a forensic person had said “people who are readying for suicide, tend to perspire heavily.”  “Lord,” he’d wondered, “is that what I’m up to? “

He stood,

dropped.

Was shattered.

Then lay dying in what was supposed to be his apartment, but which had instantaneously struck him as an abattoir killing floor.  Death stepping on his neck, promising to snap and shear at any moment.

In and out of knowing for over three days.  He thought, “In my own home! what a shabby bit of atrocity.”  Drooling mouth disgusting on the dingy rusted carpet, losing liquids from everywhichway.  If he could’ve lifted his head and spread it around, the spittle might have finally brightened up the place.

“Well, fool,” he thought, in your case,  “where else would you like it?  On the street with everybody out takin’ a fuckin’ walk all over me?  In the Hotel lobby where on your best days people take you for a dingy metal stool?  In a green cafe?  A ‘hep Chelsea bistro?  A museum of modern art? Where everyone who’ve always wished you’d just get lost could stop and smile sideways with good riddance? –  “Ho! there goes one less piece of pitch.  Ugh!”

“All they ever wanted out of me was my luxurious sweat and blood!  Then again, who could blame them?  I gave it away so foolishly cheap, but, mmm-mmm, it was the really good stuff:”  (Wreck suddenly began to sing some Bowie to himself:  “…He took it all too far/but boy, could he play guitar…”)

“Go on, Wreck, he then thought, “stab yourself in the heart once more for old times sake; and bleed, all over everybody else’s funtimes, why don’t you?  Women who made me for a dildo; men who used me to make them feel better since they didn’t have ’ta be me.

Oh, sure thing, let’s have me die in public . Aaand, why not!?  My living’s been a stand-in for everyone else’s filth.  Why shouldn’t I go down right bloody here, after all?  Hot and so alone?

Yup, just the way I pi’tured it!

Oh, for crying out loud……”

Despite herself, this makes Merry laugh again. Jesus Lord…Christ.  You arrive and then you’re gone, that about it?  That’s one of my greatest fears about what might be the deal with life, ya know?  Just when you get here, you are over and gone…Oh, for godsakes, Merry says.

Yeah, darling, I record the moment of a birthpang leaving behind nothing but spectral feedback and a delightful smell of burning leaves.  Oh, and also a sound effect of very distant train whistles.

Merry, like a child, buries her head in her hands, really tickled.  Now she peeks up at me.  And do they vanish for good?

Ah!  damnitall, I haven’t quite figured that part out yet.

A mellifluous flow passes into the corners of Merry’s eyes.  She wipes them with the side of her hand.  But you will, Lord, you will. .. I just know you’ll figure this out. She winks at me.

When I do, Merry, you’ll be the first–

But you gotta let me get back.  I’ll miss your life too much.

I stare into Merry’s crossed blue eyes.  I will never lose you, I say…

Merry spreads her legs.

Aftercome, I kissed her flush lips, the two of us done with it, Ourselves in balance between life and death.  Having disappeared together and come back.  Died a little.  Fell silent… and then together returned via a whopping kiss……’Solitude,’ we’d said, ’We will kick your ass,’ and so, for one superb moment, we did just that

I Iove you, I always tell Merry.

So then, with this, at this, this is where Merry, where she just might begin to get quiet; where she just might look around our room, quietly, just to look and be quiet.  The way she does when she’s about to make it her room. The way the space then takes on a kind of  fog of invisibility,  just leaving the room ripe for fetishization.  She looks around.  She thinks. Leaving only her breathing like a genteel windchime, chiming through the room, chiming through the whole silent house, ringing together with the sleepy, wooly breaths come from Henry and Delly, this ghostless family  arising from her own projection; this thrills the shit out of Merry.  Every now and then a tear rolls down her cheek. And this quiet of her moment swells her breasts and comes like breath, waves from her slightly open mouth which will cause the hair on my arms to flicker, and she knows that I can feel a distribution of warmth easing through my purifying veins.  Heat comes from her soul and all the wonderful shadows of night whirl naturally into our bedroom, and then all around her. I stare at Merry, at her extending night shadows and the highlights of her hazel eyes, staring.  Breathing love.  Blowing love, and the lyric rhythms of her silence, her silent voice, with her breath and whirl and chime, her sounds that hang and roll in my ear and and Oh, God, is she gorgeous.  Her sounds, and the whirl, the softsounds that stay in the ear as the sea in a shell.  Merry beside me sharing a wondrous throne in a wondrous land where people love and kiss and stay silently together, holding hands and walking through magic nights.