Desire Is God

Here's the thing. I'm 35. It's not old, but it's also, like, like, I dunno, it's also like. I really want to be free from want. And I can't be. It's spring again, finally. It's fucking May and only on the last few days has the weather really broken. And the spring breeze is a siren song leading me nowhere. And someplace else. A someplace that doesn't exist that I ignore at my peril.

It kills me.

That breeze.

I really want to be done with desire. I want to leave it all to the kids, or whatever. It kills me.

I want to settle down. I'm so sick of wanting everything. I want to set my feet on every square foot of the universe, want to meet every life in it. I want to kiss babies and make cats purr and massage the ears of every dog who would look upon me with expectant eyes. I want squirrels to not face me with trepidation while guarding their acorns like mothers.

I want to kiss everyone, to bite lower lips and let our noses compete for orientation and heal the fundamental lack.

My desire is unfulfillable.

But avoiding it hasn't brought me peace.

So what's next?

I don't know.

This phase of my life is over.

I've complained plenty about Providence. There's plenty to complain about.

For instance, it's a city with thousands of Italian-Americans who walk is if their balls precede their hips by a thousand feet. And yet I can't get a good slice of pizza.

But what really kills me: the empty streets at night.

I feel like George Willard. Or Franco Interlenghi as Moraldo in I Vitelloni.

It's an odd city to live in as an adult because it's a place that, by leaving, one becomes an adult.

Instead.

All I can do is bear passive, mute witness to the frustrated dreams of beautiful people. I can never really live here, only observe.

And I need to live, so desperately.

I need to excrete, need to cultivate the formation of liquids that encase the flesh in olfactory reminiscence.

I need to fuck.

I need to kiss the oil-stained pavements drenched in yellowing light as if the perpetuation of human existence depended on it.

I need to tongue curb cuts.

I need to take baseball bats to all of the shop windows that evoke peace piecemeal, one pane at a time.

There's something wrong. About shop windows through which one can see garments that promise a glorious nightlife never to arrive. And the store lights are off.

The girls who flirt with me who won't join in the journey.

The quest.

For whatever is left of god.

I want to pick you up by whatever is between your legs and throw you through that shop window so that I can eat those garments alive.

I want you to be beside me as the glass breaks, as the mannequins stand ready to be denuded and raped.

I want to kill, but only that which cannot die.

And I want to write better than this. Only I have to go answer the door and take delivery of another sad calzone.

Yeah. That's really how this ends.

Again.