Shivers of Joy

It had been a marvelous day I had written three beautiful poems that sent shivers of joy through my entire being. I placed my notebook in my backpack where it always follows me, and rushed out to meet my beloved and another couple for dinner. Socializing at the end of a good writing day is most welcome, I would not have to say anything about the writing that I had done, but I would certainly laugh more and enjoy the company because of it.

Domaine and I had been together for a few years now and life was going well, nurturing each others souls was our mutual intent; occasionally we would launch an all out war against one another, but for the most part we had grown into a loving singularity. So much so that from us could grow a world.

I met them at the City Diner, it was an obtuse joint for me to be in; it wasn’t really so much a diner as a fine diner with expensive hamburgers and expensive wines, all done in the simplicity of a plastic fifties metallic joint. It was cool to hang out here, the place had been around for decades, more that forty maybe fifty or more; The City Diner had even been in movies, used as a stage for casual love affair scenes where a couple splashes banana split on one another to act out their true love. There were pictures of the movie scenes all over the walls, and pictures of famous actors eating at the City Diner. It was the locals that paid their bills to enjoy all the glory days of the City Diner. Nostalgic for history and for belonging where notables belong, who could fault being able to buy a burger for the price of one pound of delicious oysters.

Domaine and Mark and Eve walked in, I had already nursed a couple of glasses of wine, which actually caused me more pain at seven dollars each. Nurse your pleasures carefully I say, but when you write a few good poems you earn the right to be poorer. Slowly I went into retro mode when the gang came in. kiss, kiss, hugs, and smiles. Eve had just gotten her dream job so there was reason to celebrate there, she would be managing the creation of video tours for museums. Which meant traveling around to all the places where history is safe housed. Oh the sheer pleasure of walking through the ruins of history, what our ancestors did not manage to destroy, what they managed to abandon, and we get to hold it like a precious link to our chaining civilization. There are some cool museums out there, the Andy Warhol museum I say is a museum for non artistic merit; unless of course obsessive behavior qualifies as art. There is a Museum for Barbie Dolls, which one could argue is not the same as a museum for dolls, Barbie being sort of the first doll to become something other than a doll, maybe an aberration of mind bending proportions, where girls want to be like a doll instead of just taking care of the doll; one must suspect there are neurons miss firing for Ms Barbie. To be fair I think the collection includes Barbie doctor and Barbie firefighter, and there is no Barbie whore so they have avoided negative role models. Me personally I would rather be a whore than a doctor or a lawyer; but that’s just me. Barbie is obviously smarter than that, anyway it is nice to know that since girls want to grow up to be like their dolls the dolls have at least graduated from college. Anyway the video tours of museums is an egalitarian way to make sure that those that can not afford to see David or The Thinker in person can at least see these massive phenomenas of art in person. A sort of cheap ticket to culture a sort of museum outreach program. And without all the obtuse tour guides or tourist parades getting in the way of your viewing pleasure. So we talked about how wonderful of a job that is. You get to travel to all these great places, and see the history first hand and create the angles by which it will be perceived by the viewer; and Eve herself is sort of an exquisite perfectionist which makes her ideal for the role.

We lightly discussed Mark because Mark is the quiet type, an intelligent, and would be the perfect poster child for the conservative party but Mark is a liberal by nature, we have been trying to get him to get into politics, he has the political science back ground, and we fancy that if we make him a candidate Domaine and I will have the opportunity to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom, pending of course the addition of a few ceiling mirrors But Mark, aside from being the perfect candidate for any party, is instead really a geek, a computer nerd, he works in that industry doing the technical things that those technical people do. So we chatted a bit about that; while occasionally discussing a flat tax and the rights of states to command their own stupidity.

My beloved Domaine had just resigned her job, a financially sound decision since she is too a poetic writer of sorts, and so we talked a bit about her first novel, trying to decide between orgasmic literature or high minded poetic erotica. Some day soon this woman is going to write a money maker that will change the face of literature; and so all of us sat there eating our hamburgers and drifting away in the sled to unreality as driven by the City Diner, when it finally came time to vacate the place and sleep the sleep of the just.

Only as we finally caught the trolley back home I painfully found out that my backpack was much lighter than it ought be. I nervously undid the zipper to find that the notebook with all my brilliant poems was missing. My heart droppeth my veins avalanche in engorging blood, I fumigate the air with anxiety; and quickly tell Domaine that I would meet her at home. And so dashed back to the restaurant despite the warnings from my friends that it was highly unlikely that I would recover my obviously stolen notebook.

I ramped up my fears, and climbed into trolley after trolley deliriously making my way back, but for some reason retracing my way back to the diner while suffering the ire of certainly losing my most delicious poems made the trolley stations seem more like mathematical algorithms which I could not navigate. I kept on getting lost, catching the wrong trolley, up the wrong staircase, standing in the wrong platform, correction after correction aggravated the distance. Soon enough the same people had seen me a few times and had offered their clinical opinion of me, “there goes a lunatic.” It is impossible to explain to anyone what it is like to lose something so special as a poem, it is irrecoverable, the mind does not write a poem twice, even a bad poem can not be repeated, It wasn’t a question of time either, I wrote ten minute poems, but the worth of a poem can not be counted by how long it takes to write it down, you just have to come to terms with the fact that a poem comes from your soul, it is written deep within the bowels of your being, somewhere in deep space the formulation is acquired and then it is digested by your soul, which shouts it into your inner ear which forwards it to your heart and then forces you to sit down and write it no matter if you are busy changing uranium rods. That does not matter, when a poem is ready to be born, there is no time to go to the hospital, you bleed right there, you cry right there, you fail to heed this, you fail to abandon everything instantly to ink it out of your soul and the poem spontaneously combusts within you, and when your body is no more than a burning dead tomb, passions whole die within you, and there you sit emptier than a vacuum tube.

I have friends that have written poems that took them one hundred hours to write. I have recommended that they stop calling what they write poetry, poetry is not contrived, if it takes you one hundred hours to write a poem you are not a poet, you are more a thinker and poems can not be thought, the only thing you can do with a poem is give it birth or kill it. Poems don’t fuck around, you don’t get warnings, you don’t get to organize it and make it pretty. If it takes you one hundred hours to write a poem poetry does not love you! If it takes you one hundred hours to write a poem it means that you suffer from the unrequited love of poetry. Poetry never really satisfies its worshipers, poetry can not be understood, it just makes you feel something but you are never quite sure what it is that it is making you feel, and yet you know that though you do not comprehend it, that it is truth, at some pure level it is the truth of poetry that can not be discerned, it’s just felt; which is also why those that fall in love with poetry are always unsatisfied, unfulfilled, dreaming their satisfaction. True poets know nothing about poetry and more they disdain her.

I have a complex mind I don’t have it in me to think simply, complex minds have arrangements that do not allow for logic, logic is provincial and complexity is unhindered by such, which is why an epic poem can only be written by a mind that does not think it, thinking is the least complex act in the universe. Feeling and emotion are phantasmal. But my complex mind could not rationalize a simple trolley stop and this was really necessary so that I could reach my notebook with my epic poems, things in time and space tend to follow simple patterns, linearity was mapped between my notebook and me and even the person that had stolen it. At a more complex level we were also connected intrinsically connected, wherever the thief moves I move in relationship to the thief, and we move together in relationship to the notebook, the crucial nature of our connectivity was vindicated when the thief struck gold and took from me what I could never relinquish.

Eventually, by talking to strangers that wanted to be helpful even when their directions merely sent me further away from my destination and tied me more in knotting perdition; eventually their hyperbole of knowing where I was going even though I could only hint at it, led me to others that were nearer to where I needed to be, at least of mind, and so I managed to glimpse with demonstrative relief the sight of the silver front door of the City Diner. I gasped fresh air, forgetting all the lamp posts that had held me breathless, relinquishing to forgotten all the glasses that were broken on the way back to where I had cause to enter, now!

I spoke to the manager, a pretentious little freak that had the coloring of bland all over his restaurateur smelling business suit, why do people in restaurants wear suits? Why? They are just going to capture the essence of the food and that is not a good thing, and I don’t really care, so here I am begging this fool to find my notebook or the person that stole it and to make them surrender it to me now or I would sue the place. Amazing the power that is drafted by the angry, every customer in the place staring at my antics with certain disdain, and yet I could not embrace shyness, I was really angry and if I could not find my notebook I wanted someone to gain the courage to kill me. I had to help; the manager kept on saying that there was no such notebook around, that no one had turned one in, and that I needed to leave the place or he was going to call the police. Well I said that is just fine, call the police, my notebook has been stolen who better then to come here and find it than the police, and no one should be allowed to leave this establishment. I rushed towards the entrance and tried unsuccessfully to prevent a couple from exiting, this while yelling, “you are all suspects! There are no innocents here yet!” The manager could see that my sweating may have been causing me delirium so he offered me a glass of water but I responded “no, no water that will just cause me to perspire more.” Yes I had discovered the cure to perspiration, self induced dehydration, the manager felt a bit sorry for me but went ahead and got the cops because I think he wrongly logicked out that I was mentally unstable instead of mentally complex.

I sat by the front door as a guard that could only keep in those that were not ready to leave, when the coat check man, a tall and handsome gay stallion, came to me and handed me my notebook. He said “here I took your notebook, I am sorry.” My watering forehead and watering eyes red faced stare towards him must have looked like a mango in disgrace; but I was cemented to the terror of having found the man that had dared to steal my poems. “Damn you! Damn you bastard you know what you have put me through!” He said he was very sorry that he had felt compelled to do it, that he had overheard me telling my friends and wife about the poems and was really taken to read them. I asked him if he had liked them, he meant to say something right away but was interrupted by the manager. “You are fired! Fired you hear me, the embarrassment that you have caused our restaurant and the trust that you have violated; you are fired you hear me, fired!” Wow cannon balls dashed like bowling balls through all the floors, majestic renaissance exploited… but then the police officers got there and the manager pointed at Dan, yes his name was Dan, “arrest this man he is a crook and a liar, he stole from our customers, who knows how many and here is one to witness...” pointing at mango me soiled on the ground, “…victim!” The cop in charge came towards me and asked me if this was the truth. I looked at Dan, such a handsome man behind bars would not last long a virgin, they would spit him out like a toad, and suck him dry of his fragile soul. “Look officer Dan here found my notebook for me, so if you need to charge him with something charge him with being a Good Samaritan.”

The police left for lack of evidence, that is I refused to press charges. Dan helped me up and walked me to his car to give me a ride home. By this time it was pouring rain, we got wet on the way to the car, once inside comfort was limited, it was an old vehicle, it had leaks through the side doors, the rear window was busted, the cold did not hesitate entering, the rain took it as an opportunity to catch the runaways, and so we found ourselves shivering but glad to be out of the restaurant. The conversation was gifted, Dan turned out to know a lot about a philosophy of evolution that was not at all like Darwin’s. Where a species chooses to exist as opposed to favorable environments fermenting its existence. Still within those constrains there was room for mutual environmental and species manipulation; for instance according to Dan the Dodo bird did not want to exist any more, so it did not continue to adapt to its environment, a choice to surrender guessing the next meal. Cows, Dan would say, had a recipe for survival, if humanity wanted to reproduce cows in this dimension they simply needed to effect the recipe which cows were inclined to accept as cause enough to materialize in our dimension, on a nice farm some place with lots of grass. Cows like farms, they are not keen on city life. I did not ask Dan if cows were more likely to like India, I kind of gathered that he might have responded, “There are more cows outside of India than in India.”

Once while training a new employee for a job, the manager, unable to remember the sequence of operations required to execute a correction to the program, stumbling, noted, “I don’t usually make mistakes.” It had to be the best most award worthy excuse for ignorance of a subject. “I don’t usually make mistakes so I don’t know how to make corrections.” That is why I don’t need to know if Dan has an answer on cows liking India or not, there are some questions that just answer themselves through the process of spontaneous combustion, which is to say that it is better not to ask, and more better not to know to ask.

Dan turned out to be a rather affable fellow, I was enjoying his kind company, until he stressfully decided to tell me that his dad was suffering from cancer, in pain, the doctors had given him very little to live, and Dan did not have the money for the treatments, further out to add to my discomfort, Dan told me that his boyfriend had just left him, that it was over, and that Dan could not accept it as over, that he wanted to die, die, and with all that he stopped the car in the middle of the road, where now there was no difference between the rain outside and the tears inside, and horns blearing from behind and Dan reaches over to hug me and tell me that he is not insane, that he feels too much, that he can’t hold it inside of him anymore, that he stole my poems because he was attracted to me some how, and his heart was really bad and needy; that everyone wanted something from him, that he was tired, tired of having so many responsibilities, tired of life, and with that we embraced amidst the clattering symphony of horns, the mind menacing down pour, I embraced him and comforted him, and told him everything was going to be ok. To which he blearily replied with a force deep within his entrails “No! no! Henry is not going to come back to me, he is gone, he does not love me, he never loved me, he always avoided my kisses, he would always rather be with his friends, I know, I know, uuuhh he is not coming….” I had very little to say on the matter, I mean I did not know Henry, but I was beginning to feel a little abused, this guy steals my notebook, and I am not very sure what to say or do; but I decide to help him a little, I tell him drive me to my Cousins house, it is just down the street three blocks, I think she can put you up for the night, probably best that you don’t go straight home to your problems tonight.

Cousin Martha was always such a joy to see, amazing that such a jolly woman never found her man, she was destined to be alone the rest of her life, but Martha knew it and she did not mind it one bit, ask her and she will tell you “aw who needs a man.” But the sentiment did not go much deeper than the words, Martha had many male friends, she would travel with them and party with them and equally so with women, but she was just not the marrying type, and maybe she did not even need sex, occasionally she would ask me what it was like to make love, this is the kind of question that one should never answer, especially if one knows how to make love, which of course no one really does, love making just happens. The most I would say to her “Oh its wonderful Martha, just like eating an ice cream on a sunny day.” I could imagine her eating an ice cream as soon as the next opportune sun would arise.

Martha’s hospitality made her the gateway to all of the family tragedies, no matter how superficial the relationship with the relatives, some how they all confided in Martha, they all came here to stay when the marital fights got out of hand, the children would run away to Martha’s. She was a sort of treasured family jewel, no one ever got angry with Martha, Martha never seemed to have any problems either, the fact that she did not have a man was not a problem, and in someway it was difficult to imagine that such a colorful dresser and such a musical personality as she was, could possibly be sexless, somewhere in the universe her consummation was being confirmed.

Martha did not ask me any questions about my companion, she just wanted to know if I was ok, I responded “No I am fine, a little wet” smirking “and lot tired but I am always ok you know that.” “sure, sure I know that.” “My friend here needs a place to rest for the night away from his troubles, would that be fine?” “Fine? Of course it is fine, anything for you, you bring in the entire Canadian mounted brigade and they can stay too, you know I don’t mind. He can sleep in the guest bedroom and you can sleep in the study, I’ll make it comfortable for both of you.” “Oh no, no just for Dan, I wont be staying, have to get home to the wife you know. Oh could you call her and tell her I am drying here with you and will catch a cab home soon. Better too if you don’t say anything about Dan.” “I will call her promptly after I make the bed, and bring you two your favorite hot chocolate.” That was Martha, no prodding questions, no inquisitions, which is why everyone told her everything.

Dan laid in the bed while I sat beside him, and I held his hand, the hot chocolate had done a lot of comforting, Martha was minding her business down stairs; so I felt comfortable enough to roll Dan over, and I gave a nice back rub, gently forcing all those knots of endless sorrows to dissipate somewhat, he just needed touching from some one that was not going to harm him, he spoke gently of my kindness, and how grateful he was for it. When he fell sleep, I left the notebook by his side. I walked down stairs and gave Martha a loving hug, and even had a second hot chocolate while waiting for the cab.

I got home and went straight to bed, next to my beloved, in silence whispering good night to Dan as well.

RC