To Lay It As It Plays

There’s something terribly pretentious about a poem, but there’s no better voice in which to tell us when it all started than a poet’s voice.

It started with the joyful wisdom and some dismally smart hypochondriac who hypothesized the death of divinity as well as the related curious notion that everything recurs. 

It started with him, Freddie, and with Stevie, some wheelchair-bound brainiac, who wrote a book claiming that in the instant before time and space commence, all matter is undifferentiated.

One numerological year before a brief history was written, that’s us born from undifferentiated matter into a now-extinct hospital in a country whose flag is now on the verge of extinction because people who once insisted on being called Negro and queens (but are currently called Blackish and Queer) now insist on having things done Burger King style and not Sinatra our way.

That’s us on a Rampart District veranda at the tender age of two dressed in drag by our older female cousins who didn’t know then that at the age of 30 (and several times thereafter) we’d have some serious gender identity issues.

And that’s us at the feral age of five consuming an entire bottle of children’s Tylenol even though we knew we shouldn’t. We greedily gobbled juvenile acetaminophen because the tablets tasted good. We did it not knowing that we’d fess up to our mom who’d rush us to the hospital to have our stomach pumped.

And that hypochondriac who started it all may have been an anti-Christ, but G-d knows we were born again before we were baptized and were baptized before we were born again at First Baptist school in Huntington Park. 

And this is us tomorrow: innocently suicidal at age 55, because we’re wanting to die, but don’t want the dirty work to be done by our own hand.

But we digress, or regress. We recur, or return, to say we’re grateful we remember what lies ahead only in glimpses or snatches. 

And we thank the dead divinity for that because recalling the future only to repeat it would be an exercise in madness. As long as forgetting is an antonym for futile it isn’t a synonym for futile.

There are some things, however, we won’t render to the antonym of futility.

We can’t forget when we first saw blonde Shannon’s abundant body, or when brunette Natasha first tantalizingly took our breath.

We can’t forget when we told Chris that if we were to kiss a man, we wouldn’t mind kissing Mikey, and can’t forget when our hand was on the cock of an undergrad (or was it the male undergrad grasping our cock?).

We can’t forget when we sent a manuscript of a dissertation that could’ve earned us a Ph.D. to Paul, but because we had betrayed him and had made his shit list and were in an insane asylum, the best he could do was write a letter forbidding us to write for him ever again.

And there are other more recent things we can’t forget.

Like us escaping from a recovery home in the rehab riviera because some childish adult wouldn’t clean up after himself, or participate in the program like everyone else was obligated to. This was the same adolescent grown-up who smoked like a vampire bat and blasted trap from the living room tv at inconvenient hours of the day; the same immature mature person who didn’t agree to a gentlemanly three knockdown rule fight when we challenged him to one in the parking lot of another uneventfully delusional A.A. meeting.

So, because our imagination had made this same puerile person into a monster and we were buzzing on Natural American Spirits and cold cowardice, that’s us again, climbing over fences, being hunted by police helicopter searchlights, setting a rubbish bin ablaze like we did in Spain, selling cigarettes on Newport Boulevard to buy a carton of pinot grigio. 

And even though we’ve tried but haven’t jumped from a pier into the ocean several times before, that’s us avoiding a dive from a pier into the ocean (again), and us hotfooting it to our sister’s house, whereon we meet some damsel we suppose is in unspoken distress and who’s walking a miniature collie she calls “Bindi” back to her apartment. Later, when we’re sitting in jail (again), we assume Bindi is short for “been there done that.” 

And that’s us (before we’re sitting in jail [again]) making it to our sister’s house, socking Manny’s eye socket loose (because we somehow think he’s pandering our youngest nephew to vagrants who resemble Chuckie), and, yes, that’s us running from a bat-crazy brother-in-law, and from curious back bay coyotes, and from police whose lives only barely matter to many brooding types today.

And this is us tomorrow: still aimlessly striving for epic tragedy amidst amnesia. Still lazily overcome by lackluster comedy and anhedonia. Still Snoop doggedly dogged by chronic schizophrenia. And wanting to end it all, wanting to know how it all ends, wanting to write our own end-all, because we already know how it all started, and feeling the desire to control one’s own fate so that one doesn’t fear it is only human-all-too-human.

And this is what we desire today:

To feel that some parts of us are destined for greatness. Destined to linger in the memory of loved ones (and if we’re unlucky, in the recall of strangers) after we cease loitering. 

And we long to do something worthy of undying love before the mellifluously cacophonous soundtrack that is life comes to an end, before the acutely collective significance of the phantasmatic phrase, “it was the best of times; it was the worst of times” ceases to signify. 

And before one says, “We’re in it, after all, for the glory,” there comes a time when one must say, “We’re just in it for the return of differentiated matter and the repeated birth of the divinity, for G-d, not glory, for us, not me, because what came before us is, ultimately, what lays before us." 

And we’re all destined to lay it as it plays.