Cortez the Killer

Now I am twenty-seven and I have returned to Neil Young despite the fact that I am afraid.

I hope that everybody I have loved understands that, well,

That I love them. That: I try to navigate life from my position in a hole in the ground.

Try to live despite my strong inclination to climb into a hole in the ground.

But I know, I know,

Why rush it? The hole in the ground.

I could tell a hundred stories about how it felt when finally I got what I wanted. I wanted intimacy like a hot knife to the groin, intimacy, all soft-hearted and clay, raw organ, saliva.

Intimacy from ______ because at some moment I decided- I don’t know- some bullshit about why I should have what I want,

Why I should have what I want and I’m prostrate again, in the smallest of the cabins, the one with the haunted window, and ______ is there and we are kissing and my selfish sorrow manifested a pearl to grind my teeth against. How nice.

How very like licking a mirror, just cold, and it does not give and ripple as true reflections do.

I have been the last to learn that I am loved as well as all alone, and loved and alone, avoiding Neil Young, because he will tell me, it’s still there- gesture to the hole- that huge hole so big a desert couldn’t fill it, it’s still there that hole in your spirit, that hole in your pocket.

(And it hardly bears lisping but no hot knife is gonna warm you.)

You are most yourself maybe in these moments of aloneness, all baffled and sickened, and aware. Most yourself maybe in that moment before you awaken to awareness of the ghost.

Or maybe most yourself in joyousness, in distraction, or maybe in fear because it electrifies, or when you’re grinding the magic mushrooms in honey & propolis, or when the vision caresses a far corner, leaving only confusion-

When you are down and out, and on the way up