| the ax files |

June 17, 2009

Well, here’s something I’d forgotten

how to feel…

LONELY.

When I walked into my empty house the silence hit me like a sucker punch. I tentatively toured the rooms in search of intelligent life, but found only a pile of wrinkled clothes, a stack of dirty dishes, and an unmade bed redolent of sex and garlic…

So? Isn’t alone how I’ve spent most of my life? Yes, and I don’t like it! I want you around, mister! “He’s gone!,” I lament to Larry, “without me!” “At least you have a boyfriend,” he chides, still smarting over his rejection by a red-headed belly-dancing realtor…

Little pictures of us are running through my head-mostly naked ones, especially standing here at this very chair in your fully clothed arms. I like the memories I’m amassing with you. It’s beginning to feel like a life. Like I’m not alone after all, for the first time in forever…

I CAN’T DO IT.

The grand plan for this column had been to scandalize my ex, the Silver Fox, by publishing the twelve love letters I wrote him in 1998 while he was away on a twelve-day mountain hike I couldn’t join him on—letters which, after I left him and went to Italy, he saw fit to RECYCLE because they were “too hot to leave lying around”—around his new, pregnant girlfriend, that is. This man took my graphically illustrated, original manuscripts and envelopes and placed them in a blue plastic recycling bin amidst junk mail and newspapers, and left them on the street to be picked up and thrown in the back of a truck. He probably would have thrown Sonnets from the Portuguese into the fireplace after he broke with Elizabeth Browning. No wonder I make copies of everything that leaves my hands.

“My letters!” she had written in Sonnet XXVIII, “all dead paper, mute and white! / And yet they seem alive and quivering / Against my tremulous hands which loose the string / And let them drop down on my knees tonight.”

“You haven’t seen the last of them!” I warned the Fox in my column, “Why are men scared off by love letters?” If he could be so cosmically incorrect, just wrong all over the place, to recycle a writer’s handwritten love letters, it would be nothing at all for me to publish my own words on my own website (in cosmic retaliation).

BUT I CAN’T DO IT.

Not all of them, anyway. Why? Because these mute, dead letters are alive and quivering in my tremulous hands. They’re actually too personal, and too sexual. I’d been in love with this man!

“What happened to the grapefruit knife?” asks Gloria Graham of Humphrey Bogart in “In a Lonely Place.” Apparently he’d never seen one of these specialty curved gadgets, and thinking it was broken, straightened it out flat. He later remarks that their homey breakfast scene needs no explanation, that anyone observing their togetherness could see how much in love they were, with or without words.

Well, here’s something I’d forgotten how to feel…

IN LOVE

I must admit, I know I’d been in love with the guy, but it’s been so long I didn’t remember what it felt like. It took me by surprise, reading about it…

“Is you married?” asked a passing neighbor wanting to do my yardwork.

“Yes, I replied.”

Well, I might as well be. When I see an attractive man, I might as well be admiring a champion hound at a dog show—yes, there’s a sterling example of the breed. I’m glad I don’t have to take him home and feed him. That’s a very soothing side benefit of being with you—the issue of “men” is now irrelevant. They’re all just other people now, not potentialities. If someone eyes me on the street, or feeds me a line, I just think, don’t you know how irrelevant you are? How nil a chance you have of entering my life? If the contact is at all of a questionable nature–is he coming on to me?–I can’t wait to throw in a “my boyfriend” reference. It solves so many issues with no further discussion required.

WEIRD.

At the moment it just seems like a lot of trouble to be involved with someone. My days are so simple. Wake up, do whatever, see whomever and go wherever I want, go back to sleep. That’s it. I have a date with myself to see “Porgy and Bess” at the Opera tomorrow night. I’m looking forward to going with myself. I’ll enjoy seeing it with me. I don’t remember feeling in love, but nor do I remember feeling lonely. I’m just happy with things as they are.

BACK THEN,

however, in my twenties through forties, perhaps, how to fit a man into my life was a great big deal, the number one issue of my life.

…I don’t want to be alone, but there are plenty of times I want to be left alone. It’s no accident that “Leave me alone!” is both the first and second line of my novel. It’s the greatest theme of my life, a continuing conflict, a work in progress. How to share my life and retain autonomy?

I DON’T KNOW,

just doesn’t seem important any more. There were other vital things that are still on my mind, however.

There is no greater crime against humanity than an ink pen that blots and bleeds! And these blue-barrel Papermates are the worst offenders. I banish thee! I’m now navigating with a fine-point Pilot, also not to my liking. How long has mankind been writing? And still I have yet to discover the perfect pen. It’s not a trivial issue.

FIFTY-FOUR NOW

and still no favorite pen and no favorite man. All I ask of a pen is a medium point, blue ink, smooth oily rolling, comfortable feel and no leaking, no blotting.

And all I ask of the man, is that he hand me the pen.

The author says, Day 3, Letter 3 is harmless enough…

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Short Attention Span Poetry Corner

I wrote you a letter
It couldna been better
Full of love, sex and charm
It set off the fire alarm

Love, longing, affection
Set down to perfection
But just one of a collection
Slated for rejection

Times changed, the world turned
Fires fizzled that once burned
And what ceased to beguile
Got thrown on a pile

It’s not like they’re the Holy Writ
But one thing I have got to admit
I never thought my words would enter
The ultimate dead letter center
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...certainly undeserving of being shredded and reconstituted into toilet paper...
6/17/09

goofcitygoof@yahoo.com