mmmmdclxx

And don’t roll over and play dead.

It isn’t how to keep youth. Dear God,

please kindly force into my memory

the feelings I felt when I wrote “I’m

enjoying the company of the hottest

love-making ever.” No amen just yet

as I’m dead serious. And don’t be a

genie about it, either. I should maybe

therefore rephrase. Please put in my

self the actual whatever it was I felt

that had me writing that. Or was it

all just a fiction? Fake news? Do I

really do that? “All too often,” says

God, and I remember the foreign words

you purportedly burned out of those con

crete tablets, which might have said

something about lying to your neighbor 

or lying with your neighbor’s wife, right? 

I was not there, and am not fluent in the

language.  But I am definitely not a 

lie.  No fiction am I.  At least not

that I'm aware of.  Growing up,

however, all of my neighbors 

were elderly.  There were no

eligible bachelors in the

vicinity of my youth.

But as life has pro

gressed, I have become

more aware, which oddly

has coincided with becoming

less sure of any truths I might

ever have thought I knew, less

clear in conviction, especially with

regard to right versus wrong, good

versus evil.  But from all the way

back then until this quiet and

present moment, me sitting

here in the dead of a hot

night, I am repeatedly

reminded of this, or

at least it seems

more valid to 

me than ever:

you can strive

for a lifetime

to attempt to

become whom

ever you most 

desire in this 

world, but

you can 

never be

that person,

nor can you

possess him.