More poetry

[amul]

There is dust on the bottom shelf of my bookcase A gray fog building over the journals of my youth I cannot bend low enough to sweep it away For my back is stiff with pride and old injuries

It's been a strange week. I live in a world where phrases like, "By the time I'm done with you, you'll barely remember that you consented to this," is a sweet nothing whispered in someone's ear. I've built a life where I can fuck three or four women in one weekend, but it takes hours of consulting calendars and careful negotiation if I want to watch a movie with my arms wrapped around someone dear to my heart.

Naked, sweaty, panting, a girl on the verge of orgasm cries out, "Why aren't you ever satisfied with what you have?" I curl my fingers into a fist and whisper with deadly malevolence, You think you know me, bitch? Later, swathed in blankets, as I comb the tangles out of her hair, she breaks the silence. "I do think I know you," she says. "At least a little. Does that really upset you?" Shhh, no no. It just always surprises me when I realize that someone is paying attention.

I will make time for Things To Be Done: fucking, drinking, eating, making art, editing work, replying to comments, paying bills, cleaning dishes. I will devise strategies to become better and faster and happier when doing all of these things. But I have yet to learn how to make time for relaxing. For stopping.

Nowhere, ever, in my shiny new google calendar, does it say, "Do nothing," or "sit still," or "be alone." Yet I feel like these are the things I do far too much of.

In this crazy twisted moment, where I revel in the life I live while mourning the things I don't have, struggling to achieve my dreams while so many people try to tell me how proud they are of me before I have even truly begun, I find myself turning back to my gods.

Gods. The strange blend of faiths developed by a precocious boy who reads too much and was told by Someone Who Knows that I have carte blanche to make up the rules of faith however they suite me. Hindu goddesses in roman togas. Jackal headed death gods dancing a Raas. The gods I worship these days look like little lego-people assembled out of the nearest bits at hand.

I turn to them, wishing (praying?) with a fervor I have not known since I first discovered the existence of Evil still in the world. I call out, desperate that at least one of them might carry a scale upon which my soul might be weighed with an unbiased hand. If I could only return to my boyhood faith, I might wish for a visitation, a conversation with the divine....

...An answer which could not be denied.

No, the truth is that I want to know what the score is, and how many innings are left in the game. I want to know if I'm ever going to get to use the rules set from the expansion pack that I bought into long ago and kept on a dusty shelf. I am starting to feel the weight of my own mortality and I need some fucking reassurance, okay?

And reassurance comes from the smell of incense and the sounds of ringing bells, mantras half-remembered from childhood. My father told me it would be like this. He told me precisely this, that some day I would come to know fear, that I would question whether I was a good man. He told me that all True Men reach this point, and he told me that when that day came, I would be grateful for the rituals and the sense of belonging. For the faith, the religion, and the culture surrounding it.

He was right, in part. I do miss the faith, the religion, the discussions and philosophy, the rituals which cannot be performed alone.

But I do not miss the people, or the culture of sideways glances.

I come from a faith which teaches us to turn every act into a prayer. And so when I tell a girl that I don't want to know her real name, when I curl my fist in mock anger, when I re-enact obscenities which should have been uprooted long ago.....these things are, in a very real sense, holy acts to me.

I don't talk about it, and people don't seem to notice because I never step into a temple, but that sense of faith, of belief is there.

But I would feel better, all the same, if I could kneel down before a statue, and feel it judge me, either way.

Comments

[gailmom.livejournal.com]

um...not to belittle the emotions behind this post in any way...but have I mentioned that when you write like this, I really really want you?

If I have, consider yourself reminded.

If I haven't, pretend I didn't say anything, ok?

[amul.livejournal.com]

Thanks, but if you're going to just stand there, gape-jawed, while I wax poetic like this, I'll have to find my own uses for your mouth while I'm ranting.

*pause*

I really do not know if I have it in me to recite one of my writings while getting head.

*pause*

I wonder if you would recognize me in the flesh. I am rarely this eloquent in person.

[rosetiger.livejournal.com]

I disagree...I still remember a conversation a couple of years ago... eloquence making me stare at you, keep you talking, until you were the last in the room with me and her.

The memory of the sound of your voice speaking words like this keeps me coming back to your LJ after months of not reading.

I should stop clicking "previous 20 entries" links in your LJ now...

[gailmom.livejournal.com]

but it's such a lovely way to spend an afternoon...clicking previous 20 in Amul's LJ.

:D I'm doing it now. Just to hear his voice in my head. ~blush~

[rosetiger.livejournal.com]

I find myself doing it late, late at night. I know exactly what you mean about his voice though...