sweetness, sweetness i was only joking

it has been awhile...
feeling nostalgic lately
especially the first time i fell in love. well that's a bit of a hyperbole. but i can locate that moment...early 1990s, an undergraduate, i was in a really smokey club called "club park avenue" in tallahassee, florida. dressed in black, before i started smoking but loving the smell of the clove cigarettes my friends were enjoying, there was a veil of smoke hanging over the dance floor, i was just watching. it was "gothic" night at club park avenue. cocteau twins were playing and liz fraser's voice was flying around the place so lightly opaque and yet so present that if you wanted to you could touch her voice with your fingers....but you didn't dare do it because, like butterfly wings, to touch something so delicate only invites a certain type of ruin.




i spent a lot of time in my head back then...more so than i do now but there, in my surroundings with my friends, the music, and the dark hazy air I seemed to relish my aloneness…suspended in the darkness as if hanging by threads that were thin and gauzy...moving slowly, deliberately in the presence of so much company. "big mouth strikes again" was the next song. i usually danced to this one...dancing to me was, more or less, carving out a space on the floor where there was nothing but myself, the music, and contemplation...narratives that spin...it's easy to forget in moments like these...i miss them, deeply.





but i didn't dance this time...i just sat on the floor off to the side..legs crossed in a sort of lotus position...back against the wall...looking past the immediacy of knee caps...looking back on this moment...i see myself...black clothes....deep, long black hair that is streaked with purple...i can't remember if i wore a barrette or not that night...but for sure, heavy eyeliner...maybe some lip liner too depending...foundation and powder...i was some kind of fucked up yogi sitting there engaged in shadowed poses. i saw this one guy dancing. basic white t-shirt, black jeans rolled up to expose the white socks between the bottom of those pants and the tops of his doc martins. thin with his shoulders arched slightly back, arms bent at the elbows circling his cigarette as if he were writing a poem (to me) and he danced so elegantly against the velvet heaviness of morrissey's voice framed by johnny marr's riffs. i fell in love not only with "him" but with the idea of "him." the idea that at that moment my life was opening up, undulating amidst smoking air and the smell of cloves and, for what may have been a moment or a lifetime, this phantom slowly faded...then liz fraser's voice came flying by again...only this time it was accompanied by massive attack...





it was a crying song that still follows me “Love, love is a verb/Love is a doing word/Fearless on my breath/Gentle impulsion/Shakes me, makes me lighter/Fearless on my breath/Teardrop on the fire/Fearless on my breath…” i will always be haunted by the ghostly shapes of my past and the not too distant future...dancing in a darkened void leading me where the air smells sweet, is hot and cold, and you see the glowing tips of cigarettes being held between invisible fingers that continue to write poems not unlike the temporary language of fireflies whose flickering grammar never quite catches up with the words..."you're (i'm) stumbling down"