Joel, Remembered in Amber
by
Timothy Stillman
"You fill my heart with very special things/a lover's kiss/wild imaginings/with you along, I won't be lonely/with you along, who could be lonely?" Francis Lai
Dear Joel,
Do you remember how it was twixt 13 and forever? Back in the days when you were a dolphin who swam September winds and ducked and feinted and came home to silver worlds that were love songs stretched huge in front of you, for you to fly over and sing yourself to the secret seas and grottos of your pale blue eyes? Caught in firebird fancy and lost in chipmunk smiles, all trundle bedded when the night came to lay its quiet Fall mantle on you? For if you don't, I do remember. How you came running into my life and never left my heart for a minute ever since, how your hair was love child and your laugh was famous, all the people around adored you and lived for your next breath which was that of a fairy elf's.
Danced with grape wine and friendly arms that you would throw around yourself in gales of self discovery and lights come bright and not hurting the eyes of me, like the light of this summer that makes me almost stumble before I even try to fall, so come with me, Joel, when the idea, the dexterity of writing "Dear Joel" filled me with such awe and majesty, that even my words could thrive and grow under your tender eyes. Almost as good as me being there. Almost. The sheer excesses of your power and your hunger for everything and everyone. Bobtailing to your mirror and your room and your comic books, come the season of love, my tinsel tree of Christmas boy. Touch with your long fingers the longing in my eyes.
And see the dolphin I dreamt of you as. Come the friendship bracelet for you and for me, ride the countryside with the help of your sleek dorsal fin. Let me attend to you and watch you sleeping, your soft thin bony body, all at the same time, together, powering you for your next sleep breath, the quiet movement of your hand to your chest from your side--a movement of such grace and perfection, it would be worthy of conducting all the finest symphony orchestras in the world. And the one in my heart, the secret little child of us that I carried and carry still, hidden from you, from the need to kiss the hollow of your hand, the hollow of your elbows, to know the bone work of why I was put here in this place and time. To hear your heart in the vault of your inviolate chest, to hear the turning of the tumbrels I'm still trying to figure out, trying to touch the correct sequence of sexual numbers. I do it all the time. Asleep or awake, still that damnable hopeless hope.
The opening sesame into a rich pink brocade palace that combines dream and directive of life and a need to finally open my eyes in the only place I wish to be. To see your Doric penis arise, the delighted griny boy thrust of ascending before me and my hands holding onto the insurrection of love to me alone. The boundless fiefdom of the throbbing throat of your sex. Imagine. And make it real. I touch in imagining to your balls and wonder at the life of them they create in you, the hot throbbing of your engine. By the skin of my teeth. Trying not to fall. Trying to do exactly the opposite.
As boys hang in tree houses in their minds alone. Knowing of wish and love and all the green grow apples in the glow of your butterwarm smile, and let me touch you with my mind, my memory, for I have such sore need of you today, this minute, and let me remember how sadly gloriously happy I was with you, with the thought of rushing to you, with your mouth circled around my first name, and trust, and the pen of the mightiest writer could not create you, the hugeness of forever could not contain you. All bursting bubble naked quiet boy, contemplative boy, studying sexuality as much as you studied chemistry and biology and all those classic lit. books your father created in you the need to read. For sake and sound mind, for chamber music in the distance, hear me now, back all those years, my first and true and for always love, the dolphin boy who conquered many hearts and then turned and rushed into the forest city of autumn down deep in the sea.
Leaving myths and fantasies and legends around you and where you were, and the golden crowns you wore that were the horns of the sun made and the horns of my dilemma as well. To kiss you, those papery dry lips, those soft lips that needed nothing but the harvest home that was deeply inside you, and the rhetoric of the world sways down, the rhetoric of the world comes to a crawl and slides bug slowly off, where it never belonged. Come the lacy interventions, and the fields we walked, while we talked, you about tomorrow, me about the love that was a low horizon I could have spun from my spider dreams that I stole from you, a horizon I could have jumped to most easily because I had you on my shoulders. Because I had you on my back.
My sweet monkey boy, to you, and all the children of the world, I would say don't let them cheat you out of your childhood. Don't let them talk you into climbing that tall tree inside you, do not climb the handholds that are not there in an errant invisible sky, for it is lies they tell you, that you are allowed to take yourself there and can deepen the truth; no, no, stupid and wrong and wasteful up ahead; come back Joel Dolphin boy, and swim in my dreams naked in the sea, with garlands of light bright green and gold fish darting around you. Announcing the secret code of your love and arms and legs entanglement that have been my refuge since you first stood next to me. And I wanted to be the tree you climbed. Your own personal willow song.
Your lovely goofy life slurping kidding around, not caring what others think, and you lost in my arms while I worshipped you, and said I adore you, and you warm and wiggly and happy and electric in my arms, the eels of your secret self revealed inside me and all quiet alabaster skin and honey smells of boy run through the autumn coming deeper and deeper. Repression and depression gone from the premises, only a necklace of songs around your slim neck, thin bones that hold the pollen to your lost and changeling and early morning head. For with you, my Joel, and all the lights all over the world tonight, keeping darkness at bay, there will only be early morning, and crisp early cold dew and mountain winds and clouds that look like parts of your body taken and rouged in early sun glow and white billowy hallows of sky marshmallows, manifest and covering with compassion the whole of the world.
With all of life imitating you and mimicking you. Come close and smell the moment of yesterday, when you could believe in something and early on before it was all gone wrong. Before other people's stupid cruel crude complacent ridiculous theories, one and all. Black and white--so easy, no talent to see it all that way. It's like politicians and evangelists popping off on swearing fealty to God and country. It calls for no bravery. Me, though? I see only in shades of gray. I'm never sure. Always hesitant. I've apologized my way through life. Can one day I finally stop that, Joel? Will someone finally invent a friggin' time machine already, for God's sake and get a move on????
How could my love for you even be wrong? Wrong as rain. No. Not my sleek seraphic blue night love dolphin whose fin I held to as you took me through the wine air, as you led me to your barn where we jumped and climbed in the gold shell hay, where we lay with our heads close together, all earthy smells and life aborning, and I tried to get the doggerel right in my mind, so I could give it to you, the ten pennies that were the world of words I knew back then, that came out grass stained and hay and mouth scared dry and acrid smelling there in the shadowy pretend of the barn with the roof lopsided, filled with decay, and crumbling as the sun ate into it eager to see what we had and what we had was you.
And I longed and lusted and desired and wept long night hours all round the clock, to be a part of your endless early morning, when the sea beast came to me and said there are lands locked under water so deep it is beyond cold and blue and black, and coral has never been heard of down there, no matter how pink and ivory and perfect and fine and sheer it might be, because there are cotton skies to run, and there is Joel in my mind, right now, running the fields of yesterday, and you naked with your limp penis and balls bigger (I imagine once, and then imagine the opposite) than your dick, so intriguing, that; to have it grow to fit their already heavy training wheels soon and soon, and your wild wind laughter on the winds of all the songs there are that he knew simply by existing. Simply by running through the grass and the hay and the meadows with me, running for your future, running for the tree to climb. I am losing ground. I can't catch up. I have to stop to breathe. There is a stitch in my side. Help me, Joel!
And the tree me said here I am Joel, climb up and taste tomorrow, taste tomorrow with me because running through the door of November and December and winter, you will not spend them with me or even tossed aside ten pennies of my love that rolled next to you as though they once were wagon wheels decked in brocade bunting of happiness pulling a carnival down the road, trying to catch up with you. Trying to locate a map that had anything but you on it and failing over and again.
Oh Joel, let me feel the opening of your sweet longed for thighs, let me put my face in the crotch of the branches of them, and let me explore the road map that came birthing strong and tender and oldly wise before your time, carrying only your name. Let me feel your long legs thrumming power and your long toes stretching and your arms beside your head, making a boy curve exclamation mark around it, and let your tongue loose the wildflowers around you,as your chest is finally there for mine to ease onto, the bed of gods. Saying goodbye to Fall and hello to the world that we will laugh at and turn easily on its cauliflower ear, and we will be us and will be a part of it and never apart again again.
How it was and how it was right and how it broke my eyes and flooded them with your goodness, your rightness, your moment that was capsule of love that was never mentioned, never noticed until a grim Saturday night two years hence. Touch the floor and let me hold you from the back and trace the dragon teeth of your bent over spine, with my glad and grateful hands. Let me feel the warmth of your buttocks, the tender heart melt unadorned defenseless back entrance into you. And my reaching round to your slim summer popsicle cock and its tiny perfectly flesh circle BB balls (all Julys in the world there is to be contained in them, to the small heft, to the penis that giggles with just your voice, as it elongates along with the sound of moan from your excited no longer tentative mouth) you thrust into my hands landlocked of amazement, as though you know the ready steady go is into the arms I have already holding around you.
Touch and test and taste the days as the Fall calendar clicks and gone for good and away, bicycle tire spokes clicking down their own special private blue highways into the pearly illusions of too teethy tomorrow where she will be waiting, where she will supplant my role, my lead, my bit part, and you will find your way to her heart. And thus be allowed.
But now is my finality and that is the luck of the draw, and I cling to you at night and I hold you in my far less than clever dreams, for I pray to the magic that made you, that one clear eye of God who has gotten so much of so many so wrong since, for when I masturbate, I think of you. When I rub myself against my bed, it is you I pretend to. When I dream or read or watch the day passing my door, I dream of you. I dream of skies that our eyes saw, both of us, at the same time. I dream of the little jokes we giggled into life, and the little world of me that you took under your wing and held to your side as though you knew how much I wanted you to count, how much I wanted you to know you were the end reacharound of glistening melancholy parfait Sundays and the seas gobble the dolphins and dolphins die too and they lose and they age and they are sad and they forget the leaping joyous and hugely far out of crest foam into the mystical air of the ages.
Do not age, Joel, do not let them change you or tell you what is to be prized, for if you have let them do that, all is lost. My prince and my castle and my kingdom are for nothing, and when I cum into my hand, let your hand, wherever you are, receive the surge of memory, and a soft slit of little smile in your eyes, hiding behind the grottos of pale blue, that a vague memory from you might so entertain, though you never knew, though you always knew.
All thoughts of traceries and bed sittings and book reading and long country roads that could never be long enough for me, and always the changeling, always the nightingale in your voice that seemed to know where the sweet cities slept in dark and undisturbed slumber, for you were comfort fairy tale told me when I was so young, you were the magic man when the Twilight Zone came my way, you were the winters of my young childhood when I stood heavily protected in my front yard snow, and prayed to it and the cold and the night and all the Christmas trees only in other people's windows, and the need of something more than comic book page ink staining my hands. The need of Joel to stain them instead with pussy willows and crinkly corn flowers and blue bells out in fields that were mountains we climbed to the top of. And boy on my back and I never tiring of your riding me.
All still and Christmas tree you. All still and cleaved dolphin smiles inbred to the species, turned into the face and turned outward in an inability to at least show wonders of happiness, for the golden crackle reflection frames that held the day starved me into the night of nothing needed but the background flowers of those frames. The pictures they held mattering not. It's never the pictures I look at. Not once. I've no need of them. Not after there was you. Commendable lots of fever and sacred loam cleave me and cleave to me as I stood in front of your bathroom mirror one night, before I left your house. How I took up my shirt and pulled down my jeans and watched myself naked in the mirror that had seen you so, countless times before, as I rubbed myself and stroked and sighed and whispered Joel so no one else could hear, especially not you. As I begged it to toss some recent images of you my way.
Come to the winter of my secret, and my rushing to your memory when you were still there with me, when weekends were neon tubes that said JOEL all bold and proud and not giving a good goddam what morons thinks about it, if they can think at all, and I tripped over my tongue and held you in my stilted eyes and my turnabout that said winning is turning away, when the other person wants you, but no one ever wanted me and no one was Joel, so come to me now and let me tell you of the winter evenings after work when I hewed myself to a nearby church when no one else was around, when I sat on the red carpeted steps to the balcony, when I cluttered my knives of self and need and want and memory together and wept for you and wept because of you. Back then, I thought God might hear me. And if he did, that he might care. I can't even imagine how I could ever have once thought such a thing.
My silent tears and my soft heart which was beautiful, you should have known it then, and the long country roads that started when I walked down the first one with you, the blue bowl of the sky and the wind arching and wintering and whistling you closer and closer to me the further you went away, all skate to my heart, to my desire, to my reluctance to turn in the road because you might find me waiting and I can't wait any longer and I can't turn around because you still will not be there, but if I don't, then you--just--might--be. So I sing my sexual songs to you. I jack off once every evening to your high school photo you gave me, the photo of you with that secret smile, sexuality saturating your smoky partly closed eyes, your long gold hair resting on your shoulders, your high shiny forehead, and I turn to you without turning and I sing broken wheeled songs, for the carnival troop and gizmos and devices and games of chance and the good old calliope machine fell off so long ago, and the bray of the horse is now the bray of a mule that does not want to go much further, for it is tired, and needs to rest.
And the country road seems endless, barren and long. I need the sea and Joel and me of then. I need to find a dolphin dream that I can dive into with my wintry friend and see the world from totally new perspectives, and an arm that will extend around my shoulder and those brave blue strong vibrant cloth eyes of yours will return to me and pierce me and your face will come so closely to mine and you will embrace me and my face will be against your peach fuzz and my hands in your warm hay hair and I will not cum so lost and so long and lonely ago, as though the age of miracles had finally taken pity and smiled in my direction.
So walk by, children, who fervently live in today, thinking it yours forever more; walk by and remember that age is not your friend, that adult hood is a hollow thimble of a joke all battered and scarred before you even get there, before you even have a chance to be battered and scarred on your own. And see my Joel in me, see the song of sun rising, the early morning that will never end, the Fall I can keep safe locked up, the joy of a voice that knows mine and does not find it odd that my voice responds to it, but finds it important and just and right that we communicate.
Come to the golden arms of the sun and let me place the golden horns of crowns on your head again. Let us conjure something besides the next day beside the next one as though life were nothing but a series of telephone poles strung together, side by side, without meaning or merit or substance or difference. Let the you of then open that carefully locked bathroom door and you will come beside me and you will warm me with the joy sigh laugh of a boy discovering and wishing to discover more and more, the fulfillment of mischief that is always cats eye flash in your eyes and your young hands that make spots of golden lion on my body and you put my hand to the centerpiece of you and you let me know that it is all right. That there is nothing to be ashamed or afraid of. Not ever again.
Let me lower your already low jeans, the small smooth form of your buttocks beginning to unveil to my touch, warm and known and the width of your bottom unhidden, and let me kneel in front of you and let me explore the pollen that weaves dusky grace around the root of you, and in the morning to feel your silken dreams spider spun all the night time hours so we can climb our own trees of gossamer influx, that turn us away from the lies of tomorrow, the long and tired and tiresome looms we will otherwise spin forever in my lonely tower of Rapunzel, with you too, spinning them, but only my dream boarded up in ever leavening majesty that gets just a little more sad, a little more content with the sadness each and every day. Kiss me Joel, and let me make love to you, let me hold a body I never needed to touch to know. Let me beseech you and prayerfully take the grace that your mouth gives out. Its wisdom and its prerogatives and its little selfish boy ties that go wailing round my heart and tie in golden cords me to you forever more, so the boy I dreamed and the man I became need never pendulum swing in space again, waiting, and the wintering process fools gold tomorrow's prize.
I loved you, Joel. I coveted you. I tried to become you. I grew my hair long so it would be long enough to extend it of my castle room window, to show you the winter in your own soul even then, as you came riding along on your proud Palomino, and I waited at stage exits and stage doors and I tried to get the words just right and I tried to be as honest as I could, as good, as faithful as I knew how to be, and I called into all the eyes that came after you went away, I called down to the depths of them, saying, let the dolphin re-emerge, let the hunger stop, let the feasting finally begin. Let me be beside my lad and stop the wind from Shrieking. Stop the Lonelies.
Stop the years from clattering by, they I think more frightened even than I, and let me gaze into the fortune teller crystal ball of your navel, and let me feel the warm with my cheeks and face and hands that could never be warmer anywhere in the world that is only parched these days and riding its memories off into the sweetness of no need for crystal blue pure water and proud somehow in some twisted reverie of the lack of need, which is a lie, when it is still so overpowering.
Let me see the dusky country road of your chest and your nipples and your neck and your hands on my head as you softly push me onto you and then off and then on again in the green light red light dance to the butterflies of still active revolution, revolving in your eye lights that tremble the carnival out to me, that shimmer the old candles around the gypsy wagon and the boy in scarlet who danced for the grainers and the peasants and the people of the woods and stoicism and the land that was made of Holland hard floor material, out there in the dark night of trees and grass, for come to Joel and the boy and the sea carnival, and captain out of the Sargasso Sea.
And into the timidity of the undersea woods and me to be a dolphin of boy beside you, my Joel, and our hands on each other's flowy grazing shifting, growing, sea flower penises, balls logy and filled with grace, floating along, and our sides together, touching silver shimmer, my dusky road country boy, as we make love into the sea that allows us the best magic scarves there ever are, and we cum and we luxuriate and we need breathe only as dolphins breathe, and the sea kings push past the luminaries of star fish and feast tridents of all the early mornings to be into the mist of mountain waves of bubbles that tickle and refresh and revivify, that come to cradle, to take into its comforting caring arms--us. And:
Joel, saying, "what took you so long? I've been by your side all this time. You just never knew it. Boys can long too, you know. Do you know how slow you've been? Good God! You're the one should get a move on," in perfect dolphin words. And we smile and are together, My Joel, come with me to the sea, the sea, where the best, dear old friend, is yet to be.
Mirrors reflect mirrors and each their own particular individuality and stamp of genius and worth. And the eye of the beholder remains in stubborn control, despite what anyone or any mass group of anyone might wish and devise. Which means yesterday is today and today isn't afraid of tomorrow, so why should we be? Or anyone? With their dream come true, or dream deferred. Does this include, even my Joel and me? One last word. Please. Followed by one more last word. Hurry.
With all my unwanted, unneeded, unasked for, very silly sad clown love, Tim