Little Boys Are The Toughest

Or so they say.  I hold you, little girl, and I could sit with you passed out in my arms for a good one hundred years.  You, with the dark and stormy blue eyes, your quiet, supple and gentle limbs (when you are not squeezing my finger with your full fist of fury, or kicking with the best roundhouse a little girl could bring to this world) and your absolutely tuckered heart, sleeping and beating and storming castles in her dreams on my belly, against my chest.  One of our friends asked "what do you think she's dreaming about? All her adventures she's experienced in 5 weeks of being here" with full sincerity and in all seriousness.  But. I knew it was so much more.  She knew my whole life, all of the bullshit we encountered, all that we lost from each other day by day by day...she knew of the heavens, and the pits of self made despair, the weeds that grew from the art we drove from ourselves with complete destruction and non-intention, she knew of it all.  She lay slumped against me with the un-held weight of a body not yet knowing how much it would cling to itself, to all the fears and fright and unaccomplished storytelling that she didn't know of yet.  She didn't know about the raconteurs known as angry young men with blue eyes.

They came to you in the night, when they remembered that they had no one else but you who believed in them.  It was a balmy summer night --always-- when they finally succumbed.  You had been out, one of the last nights out in your 20's...with the ridiculous one whose presence was there only because you let him be.  The other, was the dirty tipped angel, tough and scabbed thick fingers, and the skin of an old man in a boy's body, helter skelter all summer long and guilt and the ability to have mormon love running through your blood and yet never possess it.  It finally happened.  He finally (again) kissed you ferociously in a bar, on 3rd avenue, then tried to pick up the homely bartender, because it would prove something and be easier.  Then he ran away in a cab (he couldn't walk; such a lightweight) and told me to ask "him" why he had to go home.  Me and the lesser one were at my home within the hour - he thought he was going to be sick out of the cab, but made it home to astoria (my home where I took care of him and he didn't belong, to my body, soul, mind or heart), and puked repeatedly -- I couldn't stop thinking of him - the other with hurtful and innocent blue eyes- all night, and I passed out on the bed with this one.  This lack.  He was down for the count.  The tv was still on and I was relatively drunk, just before 30 in a way I cannot repeat now.

He had a special ring back then - it was "Mama's, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys".  It was right for the night, and for my re-telling on this night, in nearly winter.  Electric lights bounding around my heart, cavalcade of deities.  Pulling down on my lungs, stringing me to my past and to who I am being tiny shards of who I used to inhabit, in every pore still me as ever.  My little boy came to me.  I woke up, after him calling me with that repeated song about 10 times, and the other one never woke up (in so many ways) and I told him, to come here. He had a bad fight with his brother in law, a good man, and there was embarrassment, violence and already forming the foundation of regret.  He was on his way.  I lay on the sofa, in the dark, waiting.  He came.  He grabbed my shirt as he walked in --- utterly incapacitated, and devastating.  We sat on the couch and he told me to lean on him, as he told me how when he met my parents, that they would love him, they would.  We talked soberly, and I don't remember who kissed who but I had him in my arms, and he had me under him, and then - we left.  We went upstairs to the 6th floor rooftop, and his strong arms broke the lock.  We were alone up there, and we stared at the stars, and he fucked me up and down, and I tore him apart, and he came on top of me, with no ego, no stains and no life experience- just the bare nakedness of innocence, the tree growing up straight with no women, apples, serpents or creeds, in his deep asunder of blue eyes.

We slept there for awhile, on that chilly, hard cement rooftop, and one blanket.  That strong, self made man of a little boy and me, 9 years older, and not a day's worth more mature, in each other's arms cradled - with no heaviness, or knowledge of how to make this continue much further into the future, or much sense of reality - under an utterly imperfect, navy black Astoria sky, I feel alright in New York City, Finally.  In his warm, soft Arizona arms I felt right.  And I cried, for my first happy night in the big city under the skylights of the warming stars, in the same building as my mother went for her doctor's appointments, my aunt, now gone, would escape her agoraphobia to run by and say hello, my dad, now gone but not away, took 5 trips to my old apartment to help move me into this new place, sickened and tiring as he was, with not a moment's complaint, in this place where I learning to stop running, and slept for a short while.  We went inside, we kissed goodnight, and I woke up next to the wrong one, and told him that the young boy and I had finally had our night on the roof.  He didn't get it.  Some are born clueless and there's not a wise word what can change that.  I turned 30 with them the next night.
 
So, my cotton ball soft, long worked for little girl, with the red-dark hair and the old junkie's stare, you are perfect in this world, here with us who stuck it out.  Our words might not impress you, and our excuses none but lame, but our worlds collide in your nap time dreams tonight ---beware of blue eyes, girl, they'll slaughter your every name.  They might kill you where you sleep, infect the textures of your dreams and take you...as you fall sweeter and moister into the crook of my arm, asleep - be glad you were born a girl, in your ability to fall against me with complete abandon, and pride.  Keep wriggling, to bend over the tide.

~ M. Lucia