thoughts from 1992

Sometimes it's good to go back and revisit your former self. Particularly when you're missing a college reunion weekend set aside for the brainy crew you once ran around with. You remember how in awe of some of those people you were (and perhaps still would be given their sheer intellectual capacity). But as you look back on that time and while you realize that, of course, you've grown and changed immensely (and certainly some of your young writing was embarrassingly sophomoric and self-conscious and full of misused words) you're still always just...you in the end. 


I recently came across (let's be more accurate: I unearthed from old files out of curiosity and nostalgia) some old writing of mine from college. Here's a piece (totally unedited) from my 20 year old brain....


February 24, 1992.


There have been times that I've thought nothing matters - not the body, not the soul (whatever that might be) - but a source of sunlight, even the smallest light reflecting into my eyes like the aliveness it owned; there have been times when that light is the light by which I see the life I've created. The life existing in my body, the own child of myself that I carry with me always and which refuses to grow up urges me to stretch from my corner and scream the way we are forbidden to scream, to laugh and hold my body as if it did not belong to me.


Whatever urging the body finds are simply the outlines to a picture far larger than the world, far louder than any sound. Sound is so crucial in our explosion from the box of oppression. To scream Oh My God during orgasm may be our only outlet; were we allowed to scream across campus hallelujah fuckin' a as loud as we could and expelled as primal a scream as our bodies permitted, perhaps sex would not be so extraordinarily "out of body."


And this writing is a scream all its own, a scream of passionate yearning demanding a voice, the voice inside my head, the voice calling from deep within and expressed onto the page. Like the touch from under the sheets, bare skin, the man touching me so profoundly as if we touched the very me.


She was the temple. I was the temple, the arched wing in flight. No one told me either, no one prepared me for what I feel. I asked myself about the color in your eye, no longer a color when I looked again, but a large and open sky. A sky void of stars, closer to darkness, you said: "With you I have days" and then there's the night. It's the night I see in your eyes. Last week fingers were for scribing, I'd forgotten how good they feel in your hair. Have you felt me ever before? No body is the same. Mine is the same, only different. Seeker of hard muscles hid in a fretted friend, I need you.


Your days are numbered but only by the fly-by-night birds that stop to you, drifting the songs that become yours. My ephemeral anguish here, the longer I'm reminded of you pulling back like a turtle's feet into his shell, closer to yourself and me. Don't forget the way I touch you.


And then there's the voice proclaiming (but softly) "By the time you read this, I'll be half way across the country. By the time you've heard of me, I'll be a poet of moderate fame, searching for the love I couldn't find in you." And this is where my body takes me. He asked me to stay awake and write song lyrics for him. Of my shelter - short hair, rope bracelets, kickball - I was still tender, I always felt. Abandoned like an island cat, dirty but soft and manipulative.


Whitman said: I sing the body electric! You said: My body wrapped around my guitar, I let the music speak for my heart....But were they your words? No. No one's words are their words, you said yourself everything is stolen. All the great things have already been written, all the great music already composed....it is the stolen PARTS of the body that make it unique for it is all taken from the same source.


Like the child in the burning building, go to that child. And my words give me a thousand years of freedom.