I am red hot. I am just as hot as an Atomic Fire Ball. I used to buy one of those Ferrara Pan Candy Company hot balls at the pool for fifteen cents, gob that fireball stopper in my jaw and burn that mucus membrane off my cheeks. We used to buy packs of Red Hots, Boston Baked Beans, Alexander the Grapes, Fruit Cocktail Imperials, Charly Chans, Johnny Appleseeds, Melon Balls, Lemon Heads, I'm sitting here trying to remember all the candies…
All the summer days lofting over the Eisenhower Expressway, spitting on cars through the chain link fence, watching the Blue Line slide by on the electric third rail.
A bike and the Convenient Mart were the only necessities in those days. We didn't know that the young Frank Lloyd Wright had come to the wetlands near his soon to be home, a place where our bike wheels buzzed across pavement, to think and watch trains. We didn't know who Wright was.
My insides are burning. My gut is full of red wine and olives. I am waiting for you. Every day I wake up wondering where you are. I want you under the down with me, warm next to me, when our socked feet rub and they spoon like a braid.
The fire is relentless. It never gives up. I pretend to forget your eyes, or smile, or smell. Then I regret trying. I regret to unwind to different eyes and a smile that is lost, then a smell that lingers on my pillow so I change the sheets to forget. If you were here I would wait until you woke and wrap you in the sheets and roll around and laugh. I would kiss the mound on each of your cheeks and tell you about my dreams. On a perfect day we would fall asleep again and wake up kissing.
If I slow down, be sure if I wake tomorrow I will be just as strong, that I will need to share my dreams with you.
I say I am crazy, that my life is filled with Bukowski like drama. (I am wondering if I spelled his name right), so I dug under my bed for Women and it wasn't there. Instead;
- Thin Air, encounters in the Himalayas, by Greg Child, 1988
- about a boy, by Nick Hornby, 1998
- The Solar System and Back, by Isaac Asminov, 1970 by Doubleday & Company, Inc.
- Out of the Silent Planet, by C. S. Lewis, 1938
I have read none of these books. As a bibliophile it is my destiny to keep them under my bed.
Anywho, I'm not Bukowski, and I don't get drunk to write like him and Ernest Hemingway. I just use the wine to get juiced up and red hot. It lubes me up and I got plenty o' metaphor's to make you understand. Fact is, none of them matter, the matter comes from the stuff that pours out of me.
When I was a kid, I used to go to the aluminum bleachers at the Longfellow baseball field. I would go there and cry. I would sit on the second to top rail and put my head in my hands, wishing my savior to come. She never did. I still wish.
How could you ever know I would be so sensitive? It isn't a matter of appreciation of fallen leaves. I just need kisses when I sleep and a gentle voice to reason with me when I am unable to decide. You were it.
When you stirred my entire being into motion, I knew I could not give up. You must be with me still. If not, I am a desperate fool wanting fiction. I cannot allow myself to become that. I want you to love. Even if you cannot love me, I want it for you. A selfish measure of being unselfish. Shallow, I know. However, I remain and will until an impending
doom and I will be with you always.