Pyromania Watered Down

Auld Lang Syne Grows the Fuck Up

Absolutely clear
In both flicker and flame
A child taught by love to violate
Lives to bring focus to
Violation as but Love’s embrace.

The Eyes Have It

When I first submitted this poem for publishing in the publication, “The Power of Poetry,” I had been promised an open, experimental forum to display the fruits of my many labors. This particular publication, because I used a personal photograph of my first love, from college, post-breakup, sitting in a Ferrari, stylized to blur out her face enough to miss her identity but not her beauty and adding a black and white image of her eyes in the reflection of the car, refused to publish my piece. The reason? Copyright violation. No right of appeal to date.

So here it is, in a more open forum in Medium, in your face and with a twist. So now I will tell you a story to add “value” to the piece and the how and the why of the artistic expression behind it.

Lisa was a year younger than me and my sponsor for my Confirmation as a Catholic. Neither of us have retained that particular denomination in any active sense to date. But when we started dating in 1979, we were both on fire with the faith. I was barely 18. She was 17 on the way to 18.

As an older adult, some 25 years later, she would fly home from Las Vegas, before I reconnected with her in 2010, to attend Catholic Mass with her grandfather by his request and her sense of honor. She was in Vegas as a massage therapist at the spa of a large casino, having decided, for love and money, to leave Pebble Beach Company’s spa to be with her boyfriend of, maybe, a year or two. Who could blame her? Owing to the utter inability of the usual kabillionaire to properly hydrate and care for the suppleness of their physiques, the average massage therapist lasts, maybe, ten years before the repetitive motion injuries and stresses effectively ends their careers in the fine art of human to human touch. So, “rock on, sister,” was my response to that move from home to parts unexplored.

But anyone who knows math realizes that some 30 years passed between 1979 and 2010, so much water had traveled under the particular bridge that once connected us, person to person. She had left me, in the wayback machine, for some goofy-looking 23 year old male living in Morro Bay…