Lrod's 115th Dream

Honoring Clay January (Lightning Rod) RIP 2/6/2013
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Lightning Rod
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Lrod's 115th Dream

Post by Lightning Rod » December 25th, 2010, 11:45 pm

The only rules that really apply are our own rules. When we simply comply with the rules already set down, we are really not subject to those rules, we are just going along to get along. The only rules that we are bound to obey and damned if we don't, are the rules that we make for ourselves. When we violate the rules set by others, we only suffer when we get caught. When we violate our own rules, we are caught in the act and our penalty is eternal and self-applied.

Luckily, I can't imagine anything lasting forever. This is the definition of salvation. Don't like it now? Wait a minute and it will change.

The other night I went to bed with Kafka and woke up with Camus. It was a restless night, filled with failed intimacies between my essence and existence. All of my old loves visited me like the Harpies of Chrissmas Past. They showed up in small groups, laughing amongst themselves. They evoked all my crude hypocrisies gathered from time, memory and the internet, like that fatal YouTube clip that is in everyone's nightmare where we are caught in our most awkward, ugly, selfish, least flattering moment and it gets memorized, not only in our own secret confessional, but for the world to see like a virus under an electron beam of guilt. We're sorry that it happened. We've had better days. More often we are kind, giving, considerate, but nobody caught that moment and put it on YouTube. But my old loves seemed to remember it all. The good moments, the bad moments. Well, at least Their good moments and My bad moments.

I remembered all of their faces and most of their names. For some of them I had secret names that we only used once on the motel register or in poems. I don't know why they came all at once. Certainly I was dying and they may never get a better chance to berate me for my lack of devotion or my excess of devotion, one last time before I again escape into the vanity of death as I had escaped into the vanity of life. They were beautiful in twos. Yes, they appeared in twos. Like twins. A young twin and an older twin. One was my love when we were lovers, when we touched. The other was more my contemporary, as she looks now after everything we've been through. Such things are possible in dreams.

When they spoke to me they had deep and sincere looks in their eyes. We entered timeless, ageless space. Not a moment had passed. We were innocent or we were bold or we were the cold and wounded ones; we did some small, innocent thing for each other, we allowed or we praised or we aided and abetted the progress of our own solemn souls on this path that we travel together. When our fingers brushed as we passed the joint, the same electricity transferred, the same organic pulse pounded behind our temples and within our breasts. It was the same drumbeat of time to which we answered before, the one whose cadence proclaims that destiny never repeats itself but morphs into fractal opportunity, the same as our love, momentary as it is eternal.

OK, they all knew I was a poet to start with. It was no bait and switch deal. Trouble is, they knew what they were getting themselves in to, but they didn't know what they were getting themselves in for. Gullibility is a dominant gene in all romantics because we have to fall for the impossible and if we don't, then we become impossible. Thus, romantics rule the world. But it makes us no happier. All my loves agreed that none of us were lacking in romance. The party had grown. Some of them had to be crashers. Had I loved so many?

There must be a psychological term for what I have that ends in --mania. I can name almost every woman that I've ever loved, and I can't remember even one woman that I didn't love. Get the boy a nurse! I don't mean love in the carnal sense. I mean love that is more aptly described as Agape. I love the spirit that is Woman. I love Woman-ness. Wherever I see it, I love it. It's such a strong feeling that I know it must be a syndrome with an unpronouncable Dr.'s name, or have a religion based on it or a movement behind it or at least a genetic marker. I didn't have to try to love women, I just did.

By this time my loves were all admiring their younger selves and making small-talk about why things didn't work out between us. He was selfish, he was vain, he didn't listen to me. He loved his addictions more than me, he loved ideas I couldn't understand, he believed in me when I didn't believe in myself. They said all of those things and more, intimate things, the length and breadth of their love and mine, the liberation and limitations, the mischief and mistakes. I began to wonder if I was supposed to enjoy or endure this banter. At least they weren't talking about child support.

Even homosexuals love their mothers. Why does it seem so strange to love all women? If a drone loves the only queen in the hive, is he not loving all women? Of course, this causes trouble for monogamy. I look at it this way: you can only say 'I love you' to one woman at a time. That's monogamy, isn't it?

The party reached into the drunken morning. My younger loves marveled at my older loves. They all asked each other, 'Why?'. They all knew why. It was for the same reason we love soil and rain and mother earth. It was because love gives us life and life is fleeting and thus we love those who make us believe, if only for a moment, that love could last forever and that's the really scary part because we know that love Does last forever and it is only we who fade away. It's not good party talk.

Facing them all at once like this was a little daunting. Who knew they would all show up? At once. Would I have fucked them anyway? Yes. And I meant every word I said. To all of them. Do I repeat myself? There is a phlegmatic rumble from the first row. These are the revelers that I won't name but should. They are the ones I called wives or lovers or the Great Companions. They are sitting up front so they can heckle tastefully and catch my subtle expressions perchance to link a metaphor to an event or an image to a happening. Was I his inspiration? Was the song about me? It's worse than a funeral. At least at a funeral I don't have to be there. Alas, nightmares are exempt from this rule and for all that I loved them, the bitches could do anything that they wanted with me in dreams because that's where I loved them most of all, in dreams. I loved their dreams as much as mine.

OK, I'm sorry. They are the loves of my life and I called them 'bitches.' They were all good to me. They gave me things more precious than mother's milk. Ooops, I guess that's the definition of bitch, isn't it? A mother? Or a mutha. Just a cut above the normal equivalent attachment It's what I learned from my mother's milk spiked with estrogen, that I had to remember her scent more carefully than a penguin remembers South. The womb was just a sub-let and so is life. This is why women and hotel rooms go so well together. Shelter from the naked cold with an ice machine, Gideon's and adult TV. Besides, they love to be called 'bitches.' It empowers them. Having learned this early on, I rarely use the term.

One of my loves leaned to me and whispered, "Do you remember the night in the car?" I told her, 'No, but I remember the car. It was a white Mustang with a back seat that demanded contortions never imagined in the Kama Sutra in order to accomplish sex, let alone a lifelong attachment." She said, "Yes, that was the night." We were very young at the time and mentally speaking, she hadn't aged a day. She told me that she loved my poetry by way of getting into my pants. Maybe she did read it. Anything is possible. I didn't care if she had read my poetry or not. Her lips were like wonderful little leeches that sucked my young juices while she saw me as a poet just because I said I was a poet. She inspired at least three notebooks of poems filled and lost, left under the beds of others who also said they loved my verse.

There were those I'd known for only a night. Were they treats or rewards or trophies? It could as easily have been a matter of pity or gratitude. Perhaps they were the sweetest of all. They didn't bring their baggage and their kids and their exes, just one night safe from lonliness, There are many tender reasons, but in the end we don't know what brings us together for that moment and then releases us like scattering satellites. We exchange glances and rings and vows and secrets and we also exchange something indescribable that gets carried forward and is passed along to others. We don't know where it goes. We don't know when it will return to us. But it will return to us like all our loves return to us either in dreams or in eternity.

I looked at their faces. I remembered their svelte bodies and their moisture. It was a more glorious moisture than what was streaming down my cheeks in gratitude for what they had given me. They believed, if only for a moment. They believed in romance and poetry and Tinkerbell and in the instant they might have believed in me, they mothered poems and songs and other love affairs. Their faces were young and old and eternal. Their eyes bled mother's milk, the tears of my nutrition. They loved me so much because they knew how much I loved them. That's why they enjoyed tormenting me so. I didn't invite them after all. It was their party,
Last edited by Lightning Rod on January 13th, 2011, 12:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"These words don't make me a poet, these Eyes make me a poet."

The Poet's Eye

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dadio
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Re: Lrod's 115th Dream

Post by dadio » December 27th, 2010, 3:07 pm

Great prose story. A compound of Bukowski and Bill Burroughs but spoken through your experiences and words.

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Lightning Rod
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Re: Lrod's 115th Dream

Post by Lightning Rod » January 13th, 2011, 12:13 pm

thanks dadio
I'll take Burroughs and Bukowski
(I guess I'm that tranparent. They are among my favorite writers_it's hard for me not to cop a feel on them)
"These words don't make me a poet, these Eyes make me a poet."

The Poet's Eye

creativesoul
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Re: Lrod's 115th Dream

Post by creativesoul » January 16th, 2011, 9:38 pm

i resemble those descriptions of which i am impressed with your style as well- love the eye contact and intimacies with self - nice
reason is over rated, as is logic and common sense-i much prefer the passions of a crazy old woman, cats and dogs and jungle foliage- tropic rain-and a defined sense of who brings the stars up at night and the sun up in the morning---

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