Cruel Summer Track 6: The unworldly experience/sensation of unanticipated bliss and euphoria

Part 1

We are starting to feel the pinching edges of the coming autumn and the shaded areas are starting to gather at the edges of the frame, a man lies during his last.

Approaching the private hospital, noticing only a few dry leaves gently crossing in front of me.

The air is still warm but perhaps a little looser.

Taxicabs carrying away other, richer lives.

Unreal, flat grey reality. Standing aside my path, brown-bricked institutions, no older than our Queen, appearing to have roots as deep as the Earth’s core.

Standing at the foot of your bed, as if an apparition.

A writer of joyful tunes for the masses. Know on many a household gramophones, perhaps even walkmans. Television and film screens alike knew his music.

A fine sportsman too and a man able to accumulate wealth and status.

A life of multitudes, yet a familiar story.

You awoke on your last day. You sat erect and sang to the nurses.

Gaunt as you were, with the horror often in your eyes, friends were able to capture glimpses of familiarity which they could seize on.

Doesn’t he look so well? I was really worried yesterday.

Last night the three of us sat together.

I couldn’t think of anything to say to you.

I could only look away and quietly erect a titanium dam behind my eyes. Trying to ignore this reality and the poverty of my response to it.

Heart monitor beeps like intrusive thoughts.

If anything was going to do it it was going to be that sign she made. A crudely drawn smiley face.

The smile itself, trying so hard, but barely stretching beyond the polite recognition of an acquaintance. Two backward-sloping eyebrows over the eye-dots. So cautiously hopeful, so pathetic.

Keep Smiling Darling!

She gave you tender kisses to the forehead. You now barely a shell, the life almost departed.

Dutifully she’s moving around your bed, as if tidying up and filling the dishwasher on a common Sunday evening with empty half-glasses of wine and the remains festering in tea cups being poured into the sink.

We said goodnight.

I had to leave the hospital before you did.

There was nothing left. Hopefully when you looked around for the last time there were enough faces you liked. I was around the ones I love, a string of donner meat hanging from my bread.

He’s gone.

A shell, a dummy corpse. Nothing in it, a function completed.

I struggle with remembering you when you were both person and mechanics, working in unison.

Leaving the hospital, knowing. Strong sunlight and weak heat making for a calm late-summer evening.

But now, at least, I can see a black dividing line between the pink and white sunset and the black and yellow road leading out toward it. Thickening as we get closer and demanding that we build something inside the space it’s creating.

Part 2

Far from the glowing squares seen from your phone screen when we were semi-entwined, under the heavy bedsheet. My lower parts tightening in reaction to the soft heat of your naked curves and grooves.

Now we have stumbled into this, a portrait of our new world

Magnitude. A Times Square of nature . ‘The Sublime’, as I remember learning, the coinage of Edmund Burke.

Compelled to heal, to study it all and experience the light breeze, cold water and mountain top all at once. Somebody tell the trees I’m here now. Somebody tell the world I’m the best out.

Painful happiness, demanding satisfaction and peace from this rush of everything that I’m capable of feeling and experiencing uniting at the centre of my chest.

The crisp and desirable heat. Rays of calming sunshine soothe my face. I hold you tight to my side, angel riding in her chariot seat. You’re soft marble and peach.

Light bouncing and flickering on the water’s surface in winks and blinks. The high twinkling piano keys play over a warm muted bass in my mind in a major key.

Grey and brown mountain tops that fade comfortably into the lower-hanging clouds. My patience and compassion for the lives that come and go around me, on bike, on foot, is endless.

Not altogether unlike those Underground moments of sheer joy- others exist. They are like me, how wonderful, They are so unlike me, how wonderful.

Tropical drink sunshine drenches thin bedsheets, a tent falling across the back of my shoulders. Knowing smiles, anticipation. Reiki enegy pulling us together.

Begging me to slip in to it. So many ways to consume each other. Hips, dick, wet cunt grabbed- mouth-to-mouth- if you like. I’m a mound, a ball. Roll me around in you palm, squeeze me.

Later, pizza perhaps. Wine- not a good bottle but we have nothing to do tomorrow.

It’s a humid evening. I’m nursing a beer, perching on the low wall.

Pink shirt, French tuck like I’m Tan France.

We’re talking about your friend and colleagues.

I can’t believe we’re queueing for Slovenian pizza.

Privileged to hear you talk as if the silly world has roused you from your common sense.

Your playfully suspicious eyes, slight head shake. Your curly hair bouncing to a fro from the side of your head. My dick and balls are still humming along from earlier.

“So… do you still want to kill yourself?”

Feedback 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/comments/9fumkt/my_first_time_posting_here_actually_my_first_time/

Feedback 2:https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/comments/9fm48v/comment/e5zkrjh