Thou Art That

At a time when my sap still flowed upward,
and each new day was a downhill boulder
gathering mass and momentum
like a runaway train,
I stood with warm, sugary crumbs of sand between my toes
and watched the shimmering blue earth
curve brazenly away from me,
as gulls flew above my head
proclaiming me King of Wild Things with their cries.
I was seventeen in a place
where nobody knew my face or name:
where no one expected me to be a puppy
cringing under a rolled-up newspaper;
where no one saw the pitting and erosion
of a thousand hurled stones;
where no cruel suburban high school burdens
were attached to me.
And I lounged about the boardwalk
as cock-sure as any stoned-soul rocker.

It was a liminal summer,
plum-ripe for reveling,
and I was a pristine three-story house
with all the decrepit old furniture
pushed to the curb,
and sure enough, in order to redecorate,
the hoochie coochie gods soon came knocking
at my back door.
And so it came to pass that Dionysus,
lord of divine intoxication,
took frenzied possession of me.

My head crowned with laurels of seaweed,
I soon had my own gaggle of ecstatic followers
trailing behind me.
And oh how we celebrated!
And whirled like drunken, god-mad dervishes!
Our bodies cast off their last remaining
two percent of solid matter,
and we slooshed through samadhi floom rides
and spluttered and sploomed at the tops
of spouting olympian fountains.
It was an immaculately stoned orgy
of dissolving egos,
and we were bhodisattva geeks
biting the heads off the chickens of illusion.

And it also came to pass that one night
I found myself entangled in the sensual bedclothes
at the back of a come-a-knocking van
with one particular water-sister,
an experienced woman of nineteen.
We pounced on each other like kitties on catnip,
and she kissed me like an electric eel
sliding down my throat.
We staggered along the boardwalk,
stuck together with our hormonal glue,
reeling under the approving eye
of an infatuated moon,
and blessed by the stars
that chased each other lustfully
through the silky black sky.

In the blissful bake of afternoon,
the simmering ocean nibbled and licked our thighs
as we kissed underwater,
her legs wrapped around my waist.
Fingers stroked and poked
into slippery sink-holes,
slithering around each other
like two squids in heat.

And as my little brother
built rainbow bridges at the beach,
the gods attended us in our summer cottage bedroom,
and I entered her, torches ablaze,
with the sacred liquid fire of Dionysus.
And we melted and dripped into one another
like poppets in a boiling cauldron.
Her tasty, tawny-brown, animal-healthy body
was animated by Aphrodite,
undulating in the sticky seawater sheets.

The priestess had parted her silver satin curtains
and booted me, head-over-bum
across the threshold
and there was no turning back.
But the orange godhead sunshine of our union
was painted black when it was time to part.
We came tumbling down into a thorazine autumn,
like when your favorite childhood pet dies
or the circus big top burns down.
We tasted the dark side of the Dionysian cookie;
felt the sting of the wrathful buddha's birch switch
on our backsides.
A gray bummer schleprock cloud
wrapped itself around my face
as she got in the car and drove miles away
to her home on the other side of a very wide state.

And I returned to dispensing donuts and coffee
in the dead of night
to vampires in dirty shades,
anorexic chalk-faced junkies,
and people who looked as if they had just awakened
from napping in a puddle of stale urine.
My dandelion-wish days of wiggly tadpole-happiness
were gone forever.
My soul had grown another head,
like a love-struck hydra.
I had become a twin and was achingly half-empty
without my mermaid anima lover.

And so, without a word,
I walked out of the grease and flour graveyard
and got on a bus
which took me straight to her little town
of smokestacks and crumbling tin rooftops.
She met me at the station
and you could actually see the little cartoon hearts
fluttering about our heads
as we gazed mutually moon-eyed and cow-pied.
Her cool hand on my forehead
was like a benediction from the Madonna herself,
and I felt like a reunited child
after a department store abandonment.

At midnight, she tip-toed into my guest room
expecting to re-enter the temple,
but alas, the gods had forsaken us,
and we found ourselves two mere teenagers
with all the accompanying vulnerabilities
and insecurities,
fumbling about awkwardly
with elderly parents snoozing behind the wall.
The font of holy water had run dry.
But still she came dutifully every evening,
and one night fell asleep in my bed
where her father found us the next morning.
I didn't understand when he asked me
if I wanted a big breakfast.

That night, I lay alone
listening to the heartless wind throttling the trees
and whipping their branches against my window.
I imagined myself a character in a book:
a man standing at the end of a lonely railway platform
in the middle of the night,
a single, feeble streetlamp the only thing keeping him
from being devoured by darkness,
waiting in vain and despair
for a train that will never arrive
to take him home.

David Aronson
February 2006