The puzzle is unavoidable. She (waist and breast) is beautiful to breed, to breed. Attracting males by her shape, covering her, excited as a school boy by that need--- but schools can't figure out this one. The many others. The many ways. We cannot triumph by attracting too many. What happens after boy and girl are done? My greatest days were my darkest days.
Who was I, as an individual, in this breeding mechanism? As a boy, a man found me beautiful, in New York City, in an elevator. I didn't understand when a stranger took my hand. I cried desperate tears. He fled. But I was safe in that large city. Kids ate their snot on the bus. It meant nothing to me that girls were pretty. I was every mother's joy, an innocent, blonde, pre pubescent boy. The many others. The city ways. My greatest days were my darkest days.
Never a victim, even when I was, a self-contained, privileged male. Slow, slow, slow to fall in love. Sex would wait 'til twenty two. Oh I wish it had been you. I anxiously and carefully pursued. She and I were doing college plays. What is it, to love? What is she, when she's nude? (I found it somewhat crude.) My greatest days were my darkest days.
We worship. It's inevitable. Porn mags the church. Media is where the many undress the beautiful. Puzzle solved. Beauty is hierarchical. Heretical lives with heretical. The marriage ring is here. Over there the drag queens sing. The one I lost my virginity to (unfortunately it wasn't you) moved in with my gay best friend after her divorce. Society was dirty. And getting worse. I was straight. Sensitive. I couldn't understand the gays. I clung to my school-boyish ways. The 70s were my darkest days.
The meaningless loss of my virginity, the destruction of my innocence. I wrote poetry. Can you imagine how bad it was? Proclaiming 19th century love? I couldn't figure out why I caught the homosexual eye or the eye of the woman no one wanted. Something wasn't adding up. More school, girlfriends, a bookstore job, wine, wine, at the bottom of my cup. Better poetry struggling to get through. My love life, clownish. (I still had not met you). The many others, the many ways, somehow protected me in those days.
I found out he died of AIDS. We were friends, before the gay pride parades, in the simple interest of aesthetics and good cheer. Forgetting our Shakespeare lines was our biggest fear. How simple and meandering life can be! But life will boil things down to fit a story on the news. Where did my arrogance come from and my frown? It was the woman. We let her down. It was difficult, that dissolving society. I hung in there with my poetry. My bookstore closed. Unemployed and dazed. My greatest days were my darkest days.
Everything worked out. Sara Subtlety senses this in me every day. She saw the movie. She didn't see my play. Children, a house, my poetry at last, was pretty good. The puzzle of life will have solutions. Somewhat true for the Chinese (not so much, the Russians). I still found it maddening. I couldn't understand the gays. Why did they love what I loved? What is all this? Tell me again, Keats, about easeful death. My greatest days are my darkest days.
