It is windy.

"This whole day has been turbulent,"
I think as we make our way down the beach.
It is a day so warm you can feel the heat
burning dumbly off of the sand itself.

And yet the day was cold.

The wind whips my bangs into eyes,
an obvious strike of envy at their brilliant blue
or a strike of malice at my incredulous conceit.
I whine on about my needs, my hopes, myself.

And yet you never seemed cold.

The wind does not whip your marinara hair
rather yet the frame of your face floats, glides,
drifting in the colorless jealousy of the wind.
The tide is rising and we are being cut off.

Urgency, urgency. The wind is jealous.

We walk and talk and sing and hold hands
and all seems well for a few moments.
And in those precious seconds where our worries are lost
the dear ravaged wind dies down, then back, then down again.

Urgency, urgency. The wind is dying.

The summer endured with a kiss:

He was the worst thing that I could have loved.

Bulldog called him the Straightened Arrow,
because *"**** like him get all the ladies"
with his curls that turned like a surfer's dream.
But in order to not be, Arrow had to bend.

Because a bent arrow never flies far.

He would pity me with his hands in mine
late in the nights spent buried in his bed.
We shared our secrets and our stories,
our ******* nightmares and our souls.

Through the sage and past the shack
he took me down the beaten trails
to where he swore no one had been before.
The sun was an actor and the train tunnel's arch our seats.

The play progressed from Act Noon 'til Act 6:00.
We sat on the overlook singeing our lungs,
flicking cigarettes onto the occasional train.
The stench of tar, then a nuisance, is memorial to this day.

And once, on the artificial cliff where no man had been
on a day when the sun, tinged terribly red
by the burning of a forest I would now never know
had played its most powerful sunset,

Arrow kissed me.

His lips
were as soft
as sheer air.

That was the day I learned to hate theatre
and the day I first loved a poison.
He was the only boy who ever kissed me because he liked me,
and not because I like boys and you like boys and we both like boys, too.

Because he didn't.

Throughout the summer I walked with him and his girls through the sage
and past the shack to that vaulting arch hung above the tracks
where I watched him kiss them fast, kiss them sweetly,
I noticed how he never kissed them the way he kissed me.

His lips never looked so soft as they did that evening, and the sun never set so right.

*And the summer went on.

"I expected better from you..."

She has a way of making me feel like a real man,
as she plants her legs across my chest
and whispers into my ear,
her tongue inches from my face
inches from my mouth
feet from where I want her to be.

My eyes close as she drapes her tongue over mine
I feel into her cheek and a nausea rises.
You tasted like coconuts and your hands were rough as sand.
I love the beach.
She tastes like picnic sandwiches and her hands feel like cold rubber.
I love the beach.

And, "If only, if only!" the Red Rover would cry
we played all the day and I had fun with her.
But I could only have fun playing with you.
And how desperately, suddenly ******
the press of my teeth had become
as I realized we are picnicking still.

I let my mind wander.
Kissing is a sport for the focused and lonely.

"...they say you're the best."

The summer began with a cigarette:

She was the hottest dude I had ever seen.

‘Bulldog’ we would call her late in the night
as she danced the northern soul in her Trucker Hat
that fit a little too big, and her boy shirts that wore a little too baggy
to hide the fact that her bra had skipped town.

In an instant she was my best friend
and after a few nights of staying up a little too late
smoking a few too many cigarettes
Bulldog and I had become a little too close.

Near her house was a monolithic parking garage
that we began sneaking out to each and every night.
The orange lights flooded each level,
painting our rescue mission clothes yellow.

“It’s nice,”* I remember thinking,
“Now we never have to buy anything yellow.”
When we got to the top we would peek over the edge
and see who could spit farthest.

Bulldog won.

I’d see who could *** the farthest.

I won.

We would laugh about all the people we loved
and how they’d never love us back.
Then we cried about all the people we loved
because they’d never love us back.

Hours passed, and each night was radically different but always ended the same:

We would sit on the edge of the fifth floor
surveying the city that hated us most
and holding each other's hands because we both wanted to jump,
but neither wanted the other to die.

I loved my Bulldog like I have never loved any man, woman, or person
and like I never will again.

She was my soul mate.

And the summer went on.

I am in cold. I watch that garish ward brimming with false light. Bleached air from his lips touching hers. He hides in her mane, sterile and alone. Why is it so hard, such an insurmountable task for you to see how I lather my face with paint each day just to smile at you?

My face, my heart, my mind not a blank canvas that I hide with these diluted pastels but a deep, rich chorus of colors and oils that were never meant to be hidden. But the ward will never know.

There are thoughts and opinions rolling like a torrent behind this mask I call a face. This world was against me from day one, don’t you dare say I’ve given way to cynicism. Nor optimism, pessimism, or God-forsaken realism. Can't I think the earth is beautiful, God is good, I am right, and people are wrong without someone putting an -ism behind me? Of course not. That's narcissism. Egoism. Egalitarianism.

It is what I unknowingly wrote across my mask. But I never chose to attend this outdated ball, masquerades are cliched. Pure romanticism...surrealism, the kin of commercialism whose visage is a polychromatic wheel of logotypes that you just have to know en masse.

What if I stop believing that compassion Himself can hate me? No, no that's atheism. Agnosticism. And if I'm better than someone because He said so then that is monotheism in all it's delicate flavors.

Can't I breathe alone in a quiet corner? Isolationism. Can't I want to simply be a follower, and think about life, literature, and art? Incomprehensible, that would be totalitarianism, absolutism, authoritarianism. What if I want to give God all the power He gave us, and watch the world change? Fascism. Revolutionism. Extremism, because releasing the wheel is extremism. Existentialism.

And what if I choose to remove the mask, break the levees, release the floodgates,    my thoughts and opinions, never watch my tongue, and speak the world as it is: A capital M-madman's schism of logic and faith. As it has always been, and always will be. I will always be in love with the counterfeit ward. And yes, there's a label for that: Catastrophism.

So I watch Beauty and his Beast touching in fluorescence. Bleached breath, save for the smoke of his lungs in hers. Sterile and alone; I am in cold, and cold hurts me.

So much to do, my mind is buzzing. My fingers are dancing with perverted excitement as my lips form words with more syllables than letters. I feel as though I were a more capable Atlas. May the world rely on me, I shall hold it higher than an aeroplane as it soars through the sky. Our skies.

A testament to the ingenuity of man the turrets, ******* the weak, and credit God; the asexual ****** he is.

This is no song for the hipsters to play as their ringtones as they feel for each other through their LCD screens. They search for other brazen articles of humanity trapped within their social networks, a web of faces, **** smiles, faces and words with us wherever we we go. An inextricable mass that haunts like schizophrenic vocals droning out the real life. But there is no real life. We are all just like Him.

*****. Not natural. Filthy. Unclean.

Today, I grabbed a handful of sand just to see if I could feel it. Ten years ago, I would have felt every grain as it passed through my fingers; crisp, sharp, invigorating. Now, it’s dull. Blunt, rounded, indistinguishable. *****. Not natural. Filthy. Unclean. Nothing for our worshipped deviant to see.

My life is pornographic; an infographic of my exquisite taste in infectious lies, in the slaughter of old days, in the times immemorial. A map of things that don’t relate to me. A chart of things I don’t care about. I have too much to do, so much to write about! To write about...me.

*****. Not natural. Filthy. Unclean.

My mind is buzzing.

Until the next day, when my bones fall sluggish and my mind thinks plainly of its singular desire: Sleep…*****, sleep...filthy, sleep. But I can’t.

So now...I work. I am alive, alive, alive a lively beat of my heart as blood runs like an inmate from the bars of confinement. From my body: a testament to the ingenuity of *******. My body. Where my heart is beaten.

Beat, beat.

Sleep, sleep.

Fly high.

October 12th, 1998: This is not an apology.

♐ ♐ ♐

Most days I feel like I’m underwater. It’s like a dream where I’m never dead, just not living. Because the living cannot feel this dead. I whither away into isolation singing sweet melodies of love and peace and hope and **** and loneliness. Most days I just smile.

I am a fake. I am a liar.

I am an incongruent youth; unable to be constrained by the freedom laces of society. Tie me down and watch me run, trickle, run like an avalanche down the face of conservatism. A cheap hotel ******: musk and sweat and suits and scandals. On-the-course-to AIDS infection loose ends who walks the streets in pristine filth. The incongruent youth, or what we in America call sick **** and shameful liars.

I am confused. Standing here on the edge between glamour and reality I scream into the nothingness, the watery void, a stark reality composed of my dark humor and evanescent solitaire: How can thunder roar so loud? Why am I part of this ambient isolation? How can you do this to me; to us? The beautiful few and we are beautiful, trust me, we are in the clouds searching for each other, beguiling and anonymous as we may be waltzing merrily through nighttime New York parks searching for rarities. For others. For God. And into the emptiness I whisper: Why is this park so big? And the trees so thick?

I am waiting for "someday." But this someday, this could be, this will be, would be, won't be for awhile. And this moment, this here, this now just passed. So let's look ahead and hope it gets better, because our lives are 1942 cattle cars riding away from the nows that just passed. Moments of incongruence on a grand scale. One night stands with our own hands and imaginations. Moments we thought we knew.

I am an inconvenience on the path to wholesale liberties. To children wrapped in barren barcodes that read “no real identity” when the red dash of judgement steamrolls their sides. God forbid the glamour mix with reality. Because when you are a somebody, you can never be a nobody. And nobody wants the incongruent youth to keep thinking. Because to think is to love. And nobody wants us to love.

This is an apology. I am sorry if I’m not what you meant for me to be. Terribly sorry if I love the wrong music or words or styles or *** is all I can think about. Sorry, but I can only love the beautiful few. I can only smile knowing I am a real somebody in all this hate.

Knowing I am a fake. I am a liar.

I am a human being. Hardly. I’m nothing but an incongruent youth.