no takebacks

Jett Superior laid this on you on || November 3, 2009 || 11:55 pm

no takebacks

:: bowling alleys are for wishes ::

You know, I see places like this and I wish this part of it had been different: I wish we had met when we were eleven, when I was spending time hanging around the bowling alley my aunt and uncle owned to earn a little money by pulling shoes and picking up stray beer cups.

I wish we had started as innocence, because that kernel of innocence remains at the center of a relationship –steadfast and shining– no matter how two people end up.

I wish we had bowled our juvenile brains out, that you had eyed me earnestly from beneath shaggy bangs as we were talking, that you tried your hardest to best me in pinball, that you had helped me scoop up trash without regard to monetary exchange, that we walked to my grandmother’s house or your mom’s house to have warm bread and sweet milk.

I wish we’d spent early evenings with twelve assorted cousins ringing us at the movie theater, that you’d laced into skates alongside me at the roller rink, that we’d accompanied one another to the country club or to the creek or to the ballfields.

I wish you’d crossed the rows of cotton with me to reach the liquor store, where we’d procure small brown paper bags brimming over with one-cent candies. I wish you had been there to pause outside the door with me and listen to the old man with shiny black skin and soft-tufted puffs of white hair sing his perspective on life in the Delta.

There we are, see? Two little white kids, enthralled with the sound of life, with endless curiosity and respectable intellect and entirely breakable hearts and a friendship that would last, strong and steady, through years and confusion and decisions and change.

I want that September back. We did it all wrong.

9 worked it out

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1. Holmes 11.4.2009

   Dammit, this kills me. Except I’m still breathing. Weird.

    
2. redclay 11.5.2009

   Exile

   Mathematicians still don’t understand
   
   the ball our hands made, or how
   
   your electrocuted grandparents made it possible
   
   for you to light my cigarettes with your eyes.
   
   It isn’t as simple as me climbing in your window
   
   to leave six ounces of orange juice
   
   and a donut by the bed, or me becoming the sand you dug
   
   your toes in, on the beach when you wished
   
   to hide them from the sun and the fixed eyes
   
   of strangers, and your breaths broke in waves over my earlobe,
   
   tingling, splashing through my head, spilling
   
   out over the opposite lobe, and my first poems
   
   under your door in the unshaven light of dawn.

   Your eyes remind me of a brickwall
   
   about to be hammered by a drunk
   
   driver. I’m that driver. All night
   
   I’ve thought about you in the bar.

   Once I kissed the scar, stretching
   
   its sealed eyelid along your inner arm, dried
   
   the raining strands of hair, full of pheromone,
   
   and discovered all your idiosyncratic passageways
   
   so I’d know where to run if the cops came.
   
   Your body is a home I’ll never return to.
   
   The man in charge of what crosses my mind
   
   is gonna lose his fingernails
   
   for not turning you away at the border,
   
   but at this moment when sweat pours from me and
   
   blame is as meaningless as shooting-up a cow with milk,
   
   I realize: my kisses filled the hall of your body
   
   with smoke, and the lies came
   
   like a season, and most drunks don’t die in accidents
   
   they orchestrate, and I swallowed
   
   a hand grenade that never stops exploding.

   Jeffrey McDaniel”

    
3. Carolyn Online 11.6.2009

   Man. I wish I grew up in your town doing all of those Mayberrian things. Also, I wish my feedreader was better about alerting me to your posts. Sigh.

    
4. Jettomatika 11.10.2009

   Holmes, would your wife be pissed if I kissed you on the mouth? All platonically and stuff, of course.

   red, that was a new one for me, and welcome. Thanks, as always.

   Caro, just check everyday and we all win! >:o)

    
5. cIII 11.11.2009

   Lady…..that was a stroll down Amnesia Lane. When the grass was tall, and we were too but still too short to know any better.

   love this.

    
6. Chris Robinson 11.16.2009

   The triggers for these kind of thoughts are just unpredictable. I can’t see or hear a trumpet without thinking of my oldest friend. He’s gone down a fundamentalist path and thinks me a hopeless reprobate. But because we’ve known each other since we were 12, we can get past this. We love each other as brothers, and all the big adult differences matter, but not enough to ruin anything. I wish I had met you when we were 12. You could have taught me how to write.

    
7. Jettomatika 11.16.2009

   Funny how some of my favoritest people are hopeless reprobates.

    
8. Trout Towers 11.17.2009

   I love this so much. The things you think of, the things you describe. I want to live this post.

    
9. Jettomatika 11.17.2009

   I can’t wait to hug you for the first time, you coastal vixen. Some friendships were just meant to be.

    

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