A Different Flame?

 04-05-80

We sit here, two patrons of the arts, dueling with stares, sad companions, clinging to Bleeker and MacDougal in a low-light café, lacking only the Beatnik berets and snapping figures to demonstrate our appreciation – forty years out of date, after the Beats have died, and the Beatles, and punk music, long hair and goatees giving away to nose rings and purple or green or even chartreuse hair.

But the essence hasn’t changed, the lovers still meet here, embracing each other and the shadows, their sweet lies serving them as poetry nobody need appreciate but each other.

We, two, different from the dark shapes, friends, not lovers (a sad fact I hate to admit), seeking some ultimate truth here the way others before us have, we following some other light in this dark cave in which we live, resisting the urges and the passions that have haunted us our whole lives, struggling to keep from singing figures or toes or worse in the fires that burn all too near us and in us, me staring too closely at the shape of you, the twist and glitter of your lips, the glint of something familiar in your eyes, the steady way you click your red finger nails on the scarred table top between us, impatient, urgent, insistent, a Morris Code with a message I struggle to resist, we supposedly above that, when in such low light we tempt fate, knowing that out of the embers of this something might grow and overthrow us.

I ache to feel something more, some more inspired light, some intellectual connection that would illuminate our minds, while not setting ourselves to flame in a passion rivaling Sherman’s march to the sea, knowing that once started, I cannot stop, and in the wake all reason is abandoned, and excuses set to torch.

I ache to be someone other than the man I used to be, the eyes that stare at the passing scenery, the passionate embrace I could never resist, the glitter of some look at the turns every face into the pursuit of gold – that flat earth man willing to leap off the edge of the world in my need, no fountain of youth, no secret cities, and yet I know I have not changed as much as I pretend, still looking over this table top, still thinking all I have always thought, my poetry twisting up inside of me, building up as fuel for a blaze I know once lit, I can never control – and do not want to.