The Redeemer

In the morning I will indulge my complicated relationship with Catholicism to attend the all Latin high mass at St. Francis De Sales Oratory, the only church within city limits to still hold all Latin mass. The breathtaking grandeur of its interiors, its isolated elevated pulpit, the horrors of the stations of the cross, the brilliantly architected structure and the eloquently crafted stained glass windows, when coupled with the incense and incantations, is truly hypnotic. I’m curious to observe my son’s first exposures. I may go to confessional. Julien picks me Dandelions, wild Violets, Clovers. I named him after Julien Sorel from Stendhal’s The Red and The Black, a novel that meant a great deal to me as a young man and a character whom I not only related to, but a former lover also told me that its who her little brother was named after when she saw the book on my coffee table, after sweating out a summer fuck on my studio apartment fold out bed. I was 23 years old, and I never forgot that fact, I never told his mother.

I have 12 different poems consistently puzzling themselves into each other for days, weeks, so that not a one of them emerges, something about trash, about black women bloating beyond the boundaries of their spandex like a pre-baked dough, “Beating the fuck” out of their children, the filth of this fetid city I’ve been trapped in, the animals vs. the cowards, the entitled and untitled, something about losing it all and having everything simultaneously, raging through the spring insanity of growing things and bitter endings, lesbians covered in body litter, women with mustaches, terrible fucking bands, just awful, stupid fucking people, Ben’s $12 haircut. I’m itching in my bones, rewatching Mad Men and always missing smoking, drinking, observing with hilarity someone thinking they can love the 30 year old me again, the culture of some twenty something’s shitty basement, drinking cheap beer and farting out back while people post on Instagram, yell about ICE, get stuck on repeat, repeat, repeat, all the while getting older, older, older, more embarrassing, more ridiculous, corny, faded and fat. When I was 9 I got caught drawing the nude forms in my step-father’s Playboy collection, my mother told my aunts and grandmother in front of me, they all laughed. A little younger my cousin Anna, 1 year my senior, told me she wanted to be a stripper when she grew up, she’s currently sweating out 13 different charges spanning several municipalities, they caught her stealing copper from air conditioning units. At 12 I was caught smoking my father’s cigarette butts behind our trailer. I came in my own mouth there just to see what it was like, I had no friends and taught myself to kickflip on the unoccupied trailer slab next to ours, reading the Communist Manifesto and Milk & Cheese on my fold out couch.

If you cannot bear to be alone with yourself, if you cannot maintain an identity outside of the constant attention and validation of others, you are diseased. I feel depression, its familiar skulking in the bones, I awake from a nap exhausted, equipped to battle back. I am weak for a moment and careless with criticism’s that the boy is not prepared to understand. In the same week I am tasked with explaining to him how his own creation came to be in whatever terms I can relate to him, try to navigate who this other boy is in his life and his confusion, this last point a complexity I was never prepared to handle and, truth be told, should not be responsible for. There’s Betty in the fat suit, Don & Megan, je t’aime beaucoup, mon petit chou.

They say the car will be a total loss. 42 years without an accident, 3 within the past year, onto car number 3 (pay me for anything at all, if that’s how you feel). Why am I always on trial? The purgatory of the never sentenced. Dante’s Inferno. I’ve nothing more to prove. I may ride out my Psychology degree all the way to a Masters. I always pick the scab before it heals. I passed 12 new years with a woman, she knew each one might be her last and never told me. I explained to the boy that it was like when he took his red Play-Doh (mommy) and his blue Play-Doh (papa) and smushed them together, only our Play-Doh was love, and the mixing of us both was him, he asked if I still had any left….

Thank you for reading, RIP to Bo Lueders. Enjoy the resurrection.

XO JWS