old man younger

remember that time
making out in the car
after the concert at paolo soleri
after you saved me from falling down all the stairs
when I was spinning from the too much scotch we snuck in
before you fully committed to your ensuing life as a happy lover of women

that was a fun summer
I just realized it was 1985

remember when we had crushes on each other
and had to make a verbal agreement of understanding
in order to discontinue our teacher-student relationship
so that we could go out for drinks and hikes and poetry

it wasn't the last time a woman already in relationship became fascinated with me
nor the last time such fascination ended as my unsuitability became evident
in this case the erratic behavior landing me in jail and the wards
until you gathered me up and brought me to your house
where your kind lover talked me back from the brink of suicide
and you cooked salmon and kissed me goodbye on the lips
and soon after bore your first child with him

I vividly remember the dappled light of Olympia
yet it was 1991

and how about when you got us into that wreck
after saying you wanted to be with your dead father
and pleading with me not to break up with you
and all the awfulness that ensued
like that morning when you saw in your mind's eye
your best friend being murdered
and I didn't want to believe you
until it turned out to be true

how awful our love was
like when I yelled at you for locking me out of the house
and then finally out of exhaustion
I did break up with you

and that night you slept with the man who was your classmate
at the school I was administrator at
who then took you to France to that healer for your thyroid
and though 18 years younger became your husband
after I forged the papers to release him
from his obligations to serve in the French military
and got fired for all the complaints against me

it was like being on the set
of a 1998 Casablanca remake

______


yet it is this past decade that baffles me

it was just yesterday I moved down to Albuquerque
to go to UNM
have other brief tragic love affairs
watch the towers fall on TV
commute back up the hill for work
and imagined my life beginning

somehow
by way of Minnesota
where I tore up an ankle
and almost blew up a tractor
trying to become a farmer
I ended up back in Santa Fe

and suddenly while
teaching music
practicing empathy
touring Europe
learning tantra
declaring bankruptcy
and watching ravens

another decade passed
and now I am old

too old for you

_____________


yet not so old as I was

growing up in a mixed up home
with its multitude of shadows
in a brutal society at the end of its empire

where escaping the tauntings and fights at school
I became a sugar-fed genius
in order that I could offer with disdain
absolutely nothing for the society that neglected me

and smoking far too much pot
I became unstable and weak
and abandoned by so-called friends for hallucinating
hitchhiked home through the Bronx at 15
to be propositioned by an older black man named Duke
who liked roast beef and Heineken

until I arrived home
already spent from this miserable life
my only comfort all those maudlin Jackson Browne songs
I listened to over and over
and to this day can play and sing
perfectly

yet I don't play them
because absolutely no one
wants to hear those songs
including me

and this litany of idiocy
that has been my life

is why no matter how old
I must suffer becoming

I will always
be younger

than I was