longtemps

il ya longtemps since I felt a calmness come about.

Icy and metallic, like the smell of snow when there's nothing else to smell.

On Saturday night my old, sedentary parents went to their separate bedrooms at around eight pm as though they were still farmers.

My car turned over slowly in the cold but eventually I made it into town, across the bridge, to another town.

Where railroad tracks cut through downtown and many of the streetlamps have been broken by drunken kids or simple neglect.

On one of the main drags is a gay bar.

This gay bar burned down a few years ago. Cause is still unknown, but two men sitting in a pickup truck outside the bar were burnt up in the conflagration, their bodies so badly charred that it was impossible to tell whether they were dead before the fire was started. The bar was rebuilt immediately a few blocks away.

Even though I visit only once every few months, there's always someone there who recognizes me.

The Professor.

The two bears I almost slept with.

I got to talking to a fine woman named Rhonda who works in a papermill a few towns south. She was looking for a woman with a kind heart and we commisserated.

A cute boy weighing as much as a snow drift kept eyeing me but he left for the cold before we had a chance to speak.

Really not interested.

Borders are secure; tests came back negative.

No HIV in my body. No, no, nothing.

I want to be chemically castrated.

I'll turn down invitations to the Monday night orgy.

I want to get my back waxed, get a haircut and a massage, tone my skin with expensive lotions, buy a new pair of expensive jeans, run six miles on a treadmill and take a giant shit, give myself a facial, smoke some pot and eat a giant piece of cake.

I don't want anyone to touch me. Stay away, speak from a distance, don't breathe on me, don't touch me, don't sully me or try to get inside of me.

I am impervious.

Just let me relish it for a few months.