Turbulence on the High Seasons

I knew a boy who looked like a boy I saw on T.V. The boy was curly haired and dimpled and liked to kill. The boy I knew was shy and unlikable.

We would venture out into the night, and try as I might, I could never get him to say what was really on his mind. They were so different, weren't they?

I knew a boy who looked like he should've been on T.V. He was charismatic and charming and I dreamed of our life together--a public broadcasting superstar, teaching nature to kids home in the afternoons. I, the poet, unsure of so many things. 

Now he protests conglomerate hypocrisy, wallowing in ferocity, he pleas for environmental regulations. And I am here. We were so different, weren't we? 

I am here. Right now, I am here. Tomorrow I'll be there, and then I'll be where? But in this ephemeral wasteland of string lights and liquor that smells like antiseptic camaraderie, I am slowly rotting here.  

I leaned against this wall and came back with a shoulder full of white plaster dust. I've become a statue, this aesthetic deception, caramelized in the past, this half inanimate, half thriving creature of the barren night. Cut from a finer glass, bars on the windows, stampeding over red solo cups like gazelles fresh from the chase. Are we gathered here because we are alive, or because we need to remind ourselves that we are? We need to feel the bass as it thrashes, ever alive, from the speakers. We need to smell the vomit, see the colors dance, magenta in the corners and orange in the middle and blue in the basement and the lights aren't so multi colored but separate, we're all so separate and yet I can hardly breathe against this wall, clear the air, clear the earth, we were never meant to exist here. 

I smell burning leaves in the air and feel the coolness against my collarbones. It burns my nostrils and dries my eyes as I pull a hair from between my teeth. The moon is full, burning yellow, but the clouds creep in front of it until it resembles an eye with cataracts or a witch's gums. This can't be it, this hollow, pitiful ache. 

Traipsing around, red convertibles, deep plum in the darkness of the night, following you, silently watching you step and step and stumble and step. 

Taking pictures of the night, taking pictures of the parking lot lights illuminating a lot of nothingness. 

I stop at the staircase of a modern theatre. I prefer those ancient ones, indelible in their fixtures, sometimes boasting great pillars or stone staircases of the gods. But this one is a building--plain with glass doors and a chandelier illuminating the entrance. The door is closed and the play has begun but I don't care for it. I like to stare, and make it my own play, a play for the gods, a play for me and only me, where the ending is happy and final. I dream about the characters--how at the end of each play they are not dead but not alive. They are simply finished, non-existent. Do we need someone playing us constantly, to be alive? To feel alive, to bask in the essence of thundering applause, the roar of the crowd so pummeling it shakes down the ceiling's plaster upon the shoulders of ladies who wear ruffles and onyx and opals and complacency. 

Next to the black iron bars that ride along the staircase are these ferns, palm fronds, something exotic--these wide leaves and skinny, skinny stems. The orange street lamp basks them in a light that verges on red-orange and pink. The light glides over me, over and over, I'm in its way. It cuts my face into three parts. A pink strip down the middle and pale, plain me on either side. I feel sickened suddenly, as if a peach pit has choked me then fallen down and settled at the bottom of my stomach. 

So I'm almost there. Away from here, towards there which will later become a here. Oh, where are we going? Why are we constantly moving, what are we moving towards? Don't you get it, all your life you're moving, moving at something, and then one day you stop, settle, and never get back up.