PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Manifestations, seances, and spectral intrusions are not the

most pleasant of experiences, and no right-minded person

seeks them out; but I am inadertently tormented by them,

regardless of how much I complain, and how much I

attempt to avoid them.  At first, I thought such occurences were

random incidents, unrelated and unpredictable.  But, after a

very short time, I began to realize that each one was

connected to some other; and all of them approached me as

relentlessly and repetitiously as television commercials

during the summer re-runs.  The first was the young man,

whose name I never ascertained, in the adjacent "fitting

"room" in the major department store to which my mother

had brought me, just before Labor Day, just before my fifth

grade year began.  While I was waiting for her to bring more

clothing to try on, he entered the next compartment:  The

separating wall did not descend to the floor, so I had a view of

about six inches:  I could see him remove ratty loafers from

his bare feet, and how the cuffs of his brown bell-bottom slacks---

sure sign, my mother would have said, that something was

seriously "not right" about him---pooled around his ankles,

proocatively covering the beauty of his feet, which even at my

ten years of age  was an "arouser" (as instructors would term it

during our preliminary "sexual education" courses to be

conducted on Friday afternoons' last class when the academic

year commenced after the Monday holiday).  For some purpose

unclear to me, he bent over, and I could see the long, sillen

strands of his probably waist length hair (something else, my

mother would have judged as indicating serious problems with

his fitness to enjoy the privileges of being American).  He exited

very quickly, therafter, and, afterward, as my mother continued to

browse through shelves and stacks for the most conservatie

"outfits" she could assemble in which to confine me, I searched for

some glimpse---a complete glimpse---of his implied beauty, which

failed.  But what had not failed was a surge of unknown sensations in

my flesh---in parts of my flesh associated only with bathing and toiletry.

Nexr after that was Mike W---stoutly built, two years ahead of me in the

school system, and believed by many to be descended from Native

American tribes from the Great Plains (or that was as much as I was

able to learn from my parents' disapproving discussion of his rare visits to

our neighborhood).  One brightly lit September afternoon, he visited a

friend who lived on our dead-end street, and, shoeless and shirtless,

joined our kickball game for a little while.  His new jeans had not yet

faded nor broken in; his jet black hair cascaded around his very tan,

very muscular torso, and midnight blue crew socks sheathed his feet.

He could kick the ball further than any of us---without shoes at that---and

I marveled at the beauty of his agility, and I also envied the dilapitated

ball that made momentary contact with those beautiful, soft-sheathed feet.

Once again, the unusual sensations---which had revealed themselves to

my body in that department store cubicle---responded, unbidden, to

his natural beauty; and the image of that, like a sequence of eagerly

taken photographs, continued to move like a slideshow through my

mind as I lay, defiantly awake, in my narrow bed, replaying, reviewing, and

recombining the afternoon's moments that Mike W---had beautified.

After that, I began to notice---though not so speak of---others:  Anthony

V---(who slipped his shoes off during fifth period English); Bob B---, an

athlete who, every Friday, wore a pink shirt, pink dress slacks, and pink

socks (mostly, I regret, shod); Trent S---, whose blond tresses were

deemed too long to qualify for a starting position on the basketball team

(Junior High), but whose adroit skill at that sport compelled the coaches

and administration to determine, after several consultations, that his

abilities were not negatively affected by his parents' refusal to compel

regular visits to Mr. Haney the Barber, and he led our team to several

district and conference championships.  At the same time, Tommy M---

like me, unathletic and bookish, and who had been my best friend since

kindergarten---initiated me, one July evening of the summer after my

seventh grade year, into my pubescence in a discussion that, having

begun with certain entertainment magazines (directed, for the most

part toward teenage girls, and heavily featuring very glossy, often

colorized, photographs of male singers, actors, and models toward

whom our "crushes" gravitated with weekly, even daily, changes) quickly

became a friendly, and then an awkwardly romantic, demonstration.

He taught me that the pleasures I had only dimly suspected could be,

with very little provocation, summoned, controlled, and directed---at my

own volition (a radical concept for one so dependent upon parental

directives)---to provide me multiple opportunities "to feel good," as he

described it.  Even then, ambitious to poetry (which my parents

believed was an unnecessary pursuit fit only for "subversives,

"communists, and hOmOsekshuls"), I thought of my first metaphor:

stars, iridescently glowing, surging through towers of nebulaic gas to

emerge with streaks of light upon the sable softness of outer space.  My

life, at that time, was filled with such beauty---much appreciated

but (sadly in that time and place) unable to be articulated

(neither language nor permission to use such language than available).

Even at college---a delightfully liberal, midwestern university with a

rural setting around which an industrial city had gathered but upon

which it had not encroached---where I met Eseph, a slender, delicate

Swedish exhange student whose father was a notible theologian in

Stockholm or Uppsala, or some place; Eseph who befriended me and in

whose eyes I discerned both need and invitation.  But, too inhibited by

imposed upbringing and the prudishness of parental prejudice from which

no escape had been afforded to me, I tacitly rebuffed him by failing to

acknowledge the unspoken and forever unanswered questions that

hovered, always, between us.  After graduation, he returned to Sweden,

where he died and became only a single paragraph in the obituary

section of one quarterly edition of the slickly printed alumni magazine.

Together we had read Vergil and Rhianus; and had examined poems

about Achilles and Patroclus, Orpheus and Calain, Heracles and Hyllas, and

especially Ganymede---the gorgeous, erotically eager, shyly seductive

Ganymede---and still, fortified by the greatest poems of the greatest

ancient poets, I was unable to tell him, much less accept his advances.

"Eexoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor," Vergil had written, in The

Aeneid, and I realize, now, that my own avenger has arisen out of my

bones; for I am the ghost, dead in the heistations of my existence,

condemned foreer to revisit----to haunt---all of all of these fleeting

moments when Love's most exquisite affections had been

displayed and offered unto me for the receiving, the giving that I had

insulted by my adamant, provincial, and obstinate refusal of taking.  I, and

I alone, am the ghost that haunts and hovers, unable to touch, unable to

embrace, the sole avenger forever unable to avoid my ineluctably craven self.

Starward