There is a large campus of yellow brick that invites me into brickyards of dusty remembrance and fondles my imagination at night. There the girls of my young fancy whirl in a dance of ecstatic ephemeral evanescence as I recall the excesses of adolescence when all the play was white hot tongues. There, too, I flail the cream to butter as the dancers entrance me, their dangling bangles excite jubilant bumbling, jingling my jangled nerves to a pitch of frothy night-goes-black, which is how they know what you are doing. Edgy voices call from this pitch-dark recess in the occipit of the spare, craggy, now green-lit wanderings that have held you down with the weight of a world whirled on a string strong enough to strangle your feeble cries as you climb down, down, down. You think for a moment it will get no worse, and the moaning from a part of you that is red with meat and trailing bone-white smoke starts low, slow, and grows. You try to cry “why!,” and yet somehow you know, and can never know. Then the soft green grass is cool to your back, and you sigh aahhhh . . . Your mother tells you she wants another manchild and you make her lie back and spews he forth onto the yellowing lawn, tickling away at nearly formed organs. The ribs are plain, how thin a cage to find myself regarding in the purple light of partial dawn. For yes, the son is now rising, finding another day to play away the spray of baby’s breath at every wedding everywhere. And under the stars, a new one forming, with the Priest and Lady taking liberties that none should countenance, but no one in the congregation seems to notice – they think it perfectly natural, apparently. The crowd waits on the edge of a towering chasm that engulfs, one by one, the wary self that watches out the corner of my eye. It is all too terrible, and all too real for words. But wandering the halls that still hold you frozen in yellowing yards of boiling brick, you begin to see a way not out, but away from in, and grope your way away from it. Touch not the black steel door (why not?); find it yields to your whim un-tactilely, so the other side is glimpsed from gardens where lay you down when something says you must lay you down. Down the corridors you flee and I follow, for we take together that which others hold apart, and apart from that, is a part of us. The color of her hair is such that the suppleness of her wand of a body reflects golden bright red darkness from every follicle – you think you have never seen this color before, but you have. I remember it well, it was in just such a campus-dusty construction site, yellow bulldozers parked and inviting. There you took your leave, and dreamt of sleep, and slept of dreaming, so that when I reached the bottom, falling as hard as anyone tossed from the top of a stone wall like a sack of BB guns could, I bounced once and then it was over.
Still, I see no reason not to suppose it never might happen again.
April 2002