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If you wanna be with me

baby there's a price to pay

In the dark outside the door a fake blonde is kissing his slightly embarrassed girl. He's already got two wasted years painted in blue beneath his eyes. And that song, which is as good an anthem as any, is purring and grinding against my wall. I won't introduce you: I'm sure you've sometime met his eyes, a half-closed gaze that beyond the outline of her bones can make out nothing in the reeling sepia night.

Last night we mislaid our youth and it was already buried this morning. Or we mislaid it awhile ago and forgot to look around. It is not too hard to keep alive without staying young. Your resume; can help you. Look in the mirror and let twenty years elapse. Your face is marked out already: the wrinkles have already finished their blueprints.

A man grows a bottle of champagne and puts it away for one hundred years. When it is finally poured drinking is still trying to reinvent itself. Drink now!-while your alcoholism has yet to ferment. A few pages further into the story it will be just a part of your marriage.

Tonight we dine on vulnerability. Open that closet where you keep all the boys, all the girls you rejected and then smiled, and pick out something nice to wear. Don't worry, you're not the exception. You caused enough pain to be respectable. And your own memories were the first to wither from your pity. All we could do was talk about you behind your back, fight over your entrails and in a sad little way we cherished you. There is (like always) a little bit of justice and here even the losers get their chance to hurt.

And all the time no-one -- and particularly no two together -- with the courage to break through the indifference, the selfishness that makes smoke and mystery where there ought to be a naked flame. And we project into ambition (are you too an artist?) our bright little moments of unstrangled love. We catch sparks of ecstasy and blow on those until they die. We do not have the courage of our philosophers.

And beneath it all is our pathetic sense of originality, the heartbreaking promise to ourselves that we invented these compromises. But it was waiting here for us the whole time, from the very first day these recycled rooms stank with the same old mistakes. You are not the first girl to find bitter more intense than sweet. You are not the first boy chasing after the moon. Drinking is your parents' vice and when you smoke pot the night will move to a dreamy and menacing and utterly pointless music. I am not writing this for anyone who is a real stoner. God bless the camaraderie of real stoners. God bless the frats and sororities, too, for their naked pinks and open gullets. For the way they gulp down and vomit up their pleasures with so much less nausea. It is sad they are already as old as us beneath the makeup.

Written on a wall of days that succumbed to routine:

FUCK TS ELIOT. FUCK VIRGINIA WOOLF. FUCK F. SCOTT FITZGERALD. FUCK JD SALINGER.

Everyone you know has delivered your eulogy. Maybe their mistake was just being casual, putting you across in a few lines that left unspoken a burning sea of emotion that makes it intense enough to bear, that coats our unrealized lives like a melted opal and hides the hollow underneath. Ask everyone what they said sometime when you're both far gone. We are left with only our portraits of each other, basilisk horrors all and even the teller is turned to stone.

Where is our redemption? Forget your beauty. It is already obscured by a smirk that will yellow with age. What was the point? We shouldn't look into the bright still undaily future, unless we're in a hurry to get even older. What, finally, do we have to carry away-

Only that when people cry, when they acquiesce to kiss, when they look up at you from contemplating their own vomit, they have their moments. Merely because they have nothing left to lose, because loneliness has broken through to the visible surface. Remembering moments when that courage was birthed by despair is like picking tiny stars out of excrement. And we've all read enough to name the sword over our heads. But only rarely can we read the writing along the blade:

IN THE MEANTIME, THERE IS NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE.

PS.

It is even too late for hypocrisy.

[jwk]