From One Corner of Hell to the Other

After the ghosts come the demons and after the demons a mirror in which Satan plays a last cruel game with you.

Remember fucking to the radio.

Men who still scare me, because they awaken in me what longs to destroy them, which - don't lose the thread, Sean - awakens what can destroy them, which is what I fear, which is me. 

Having no friends to speak of, no followers or teachers, just this weary sojourn from one corner of hell to the other, the tedium occasionally broken by a woman who knows how to listen and can hold her end of the dialogue, and understands fucking as a clumsy, largely unnecessary, extension of the underlying effort at communion.

Faroff maple trees moving in winds that are mostly quiet.

Letting go of Jesus is the hardest part.

She moans in her sleep and I waken and murmur Emily Dickinson poems, a trick I learned that sometimes calms her but which this time does not. 

In a way, my dick is permanently stuck in the late eighties, when everything was falling apart and sex a way of remembering something important about not dying. 

Let us laugh.

Chrisoula's Goddess is our focal point - she is most of the time Her embodiment - and I am not allowed to name Her, and when I try Chrisoula angrily denies Her existence, yet remains with me, which is the lesson I most need (obviously) but is also the one I am least interested in remembering, so, you know, baby steps.

Summer is the most sensual season, the forbidden lushness of Spring settling into something still and manageable.

In my heart is a scarlet violin - nobody is allowed to play it but her - I made it when I was twenty-one or two and she had fled across a lake leaving many drowned ships in her wake - and she has not come back - and yet.

He asks where to start with Dylan and I'm too tired to think clearly, can't put it into words, you start where the heart says start, what else.

How sad I was when she said her husband liked jacking off on her face, offering to let me if I wanted, and I couldn't explain - and feared I would never be able to explain - the way sex was the opposite of desecration and semen not an ornament to admire (or a weapon to deploy) but an offering to accept, which acceptance was procreative at levels only the cosmos truly understood, i.e., who the fuck was I to judge another's sex life? 

Shelter from the storm indeed.

She leans into me on the porch before I leave, a little something something.

The piano in the middle of Bob Seger's Against the Wind, how listening to it became a kind of bridge or ladder by which childhood ended and something difficult and beautiful began.

It's interpretation all the way down, I get it now, thanks turtles. 

Buttercups, battle ships, blast patterns.

Dad appears now in the nightmares smiling stupidly and I see at last how lost he was - how hurt and confused - and how he fought valiantly but uselessly and how that fight became in a way my fight - and I wake up inside the nightmares and carry the horror into the day and refuse to look away from it - not fighting, just letting it be - determined to save us both before the light goes out and I forget that I too have children.