the color green at my window is open slightly to keep the late summer air crisp while i am sleeping i smell your breath peppermint and nicotine my eyes drift open just a sliver 

i am recalling you my breath visible all i see is a misty green and then your face i never realized just how young i was back then new to a razor choked by my catholic coat and tie a boy's first climax deep within the tightness of his greatest taboo the cry connection spasm rejection of all the lies they ever told me god there were so many but even in the face of christ you wanted me oh how you wanted me my ridiculous adolescent body that foreign creature that i was

you loving every inch forbidden patch contours i never knew i had you took my hand and led me to the edge because you wanted to because you could you and i were so young so small in our little coal mining town we were little boys wearing grown up clothes hiding the fringes but that was more than half a lifetime ago 

i'll always remember you yelling at me for not studying for that french iv exam you told me i had exactly  ticket out of that awful valley my grades in a second i knew you were right and picked up the books 

we were both drowning in different pools me from overbearing parents depression my dad the rageaholic psychiatric hospitals an altar boy for literally a decade before i could no longer recognize my own face

you with your drug addict mom who lived an hour away and no dad just you and your whoring and pot to dull the pain and my feverish urge to escape the horrid priest a screaming queen more fucked up than any of us and move to a college town 

patience was your sword and your wild sagittarian tail threw me through a portal to nirvana all the lies the blame the martyrs every scalding morsel of catholic superstition swallowed to keep me holy disappeared completely the first moment i entered you your beautiful young body opening beneath me wanting me calling the inside of me to the inside of you as i shook with the tremors of that apple tree can i say it deep within your gripping calling asshole no one comes like that anymore never again 

i exploded my pain and you took it lovingly with pride you screwed up over and over thinking i would hang around forever until you couldn't go on without me you said now you'd tasted that line when your servant becomes your master and begged to be fucked into the morning my hard young cock slamming i never knew i was slamming you into oblivion

i see your face before me now coming through the window you look so full of sorrow yet just as young as the last time i saw your face half a lifetime ago how old i feel now i wish that you were really back here again but i knew you could never stay i just never knew how fast you'd leave through the dusty air of that coal mining town you never got out of an angel without wings who smashed into reality so hard that no one would ever recognize you again

your face moves closer but i am not afraid even though your kiss is so cold your face a frozen sadness your lips are bright red like the time we drank wine in the abandoned attic of that apartment building where we made love winter into spring god sometimes i miss you you broken thing

now i am thirty-four and you have missed so many of my birthdays no postcards from beyond no quips no updates no more bitchy musings i loved that wild part of you though people were violently cruel to you a small faerie who disgusted everyone even his own mother you who lived with your grandparents they had to take you

i took you so willingly and pumped you mad with orgasm you used to joke about finding me after our years had doubled the year we turned thirty to talk about our lives loves the past

now i have all the things you always said i would the car the house and husband a garden and two dogs loyal slivers of the goddess's affection for me

i feel so old but after all this time i can still see your face how pretty you were without your glasses a little boy asleep on my arm past all the years you come to me tonight through green misty air

you pull the sheet down and kiss my chest and i quietly gasp a live thing then you start to fade taking my youth my love innocence lost then gained and the little boy in me he is wearing away to rags that disintegrate as you go

a tear falls from your eye and splashes across my lower lip another tear the nipple hard and i never knew a ghost could cry

Copyright © 2002 Alexander Renault. All Rights Reserved. May not be re-printed in any form without express written consent of the author. Do not copy or post.