Somewhere under all the neon. Somewhere buried by sirens and strobes. Somewhere inside a barrel that cups a chin the way an amour would. Somewhere.
I left it somewhere baked in sunlight and saturated, with skies that seemed a lot bluer, when I was just a kid. I left it somewhere in the soft sheets of lovers’ beds. I left it somewhere under the foam of the break of waves against my body in the ocean. I left it somewhere adrift in the oblivion of space, drifting along to be a star to twinkle for some yet-to-be-determined eye once upon a time.
I know it’s somewhere far, far away from all these lights and sounds. In some distant memory of something that seems so attainable and yet, I feel that it isn’t. I go back to the beach. I can even do so in midsummer, when the water’s myrtle and the stretching dunes are like a magic carpet under my gently treading feet, but to do so today would not feel as it did in yesteryear. Today it would be a winter’s march when the water, sky and sand are all varying shades of grey.
I make love again, but I do so without ever loving. I can lock my fingers with another, but I’d do so without ever really feeling them. I can look into their eyes and never get lost. I can press my lips to theirs and not have the sweet sensation of romance that is the unchecked advance of the thundering drums of the heart.
To be Human, that’s all I want. To really feel, and live. Not whatever things have been for too long. Let me cross the river, and rest under the shade of the trees. Let me rest my harp on the willow. Let me please Cato. Let me just lay on my back and look up at the sky. I know it’ll be a pretty one, irregardless of what it looks like. Maybe it’ll be a blue one. Maybe there’ll be clouds. Maybe it’ll be grey and rain will caress me. Maybe it’ll be black. Maybe it’ll be painted with the stars and galaxies the Dutchman saw through his tears. I just know that the last exhale will be a relief. The last time my eyes dilate. And it won’t be from cheap vulgarities, sex or drugs. It’ll be Heaven.
I’m tired. I’m tired of hearing old people say I’ve got Genius and that I’m gonna be something. The system doesn’t want somethings anymore, or maybe it never did. It wants a hellish host of nothings. I’m tired of just trying to ignore what I see and be a Bacchanal. The High can only blind so much for so long. Prove to me I can be Human again. Show me that I haven’t snorted it
all away. Make me orgasm without touching me, on a real laughter and smile I’ve not erupted in too many years, too many experiences to recount. Since I was a kid.
What’s it even mean to be a kid? I was a Man by 10. I’d already been had, though nobody asked me about it then and no one has since. My chief concerns became bills and future opportunities. Every now and again, that childlike innocence would break through. Some stupid, little thing would make me laugh purely and wholly. But it always evaporated fast, until it eventually just stopped happening at all.
Tell me, that when the suited bureaucrats came, and stripped me from my mother, that I did not drop it from the hands that’ve grown to type these words. Tell me what they took me for. Because of the pills she took? Because she powdered her nose? I don’t think that’s why. You’ve made this Frankenstein, now tell me why you made me live. You gave me life, now show me how to die.
Will I even die? I’m not sure if I’m even alive. After all, who really is?
Futurism Forever 