Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2007 20:35:26 +0000
From: Timothy Stillman <menovember@hotmail.com>
Subject: g/m adult/young friends "Kids, There They Go By Me"

			 KIDS, THERE THEY GO BY ME

				    By

			       Tim Stillman

(To Ray Bradbury; and for Joel, always)


On blue bikes and on purples ones, on green bikes and on bright fire read
ones, kids in shorts of summer pattern and make, boys and girls together for
summer sake, all elbows and knees and patches of plaster and milkshake tummy
ache. I watch them past my window, I see them at dawn, and wonder do their
Ipods give them any songs they can stretch their legs too, and their quiet
separate parts, the ones adults don't like to give thought to, to kids on
bikes' march.

I wonder at the hills they climb and how in beds they covertly sex make, I
wonder if they take the days inside with them inside their sexual quake. I
think of them quite plentily and often as summer winds down, who will be the
summer star when September places the crown on THE STAR KID^×the one you
always remember, the one who breaks you apart and makes you want to sing the
old songs that lark after dark.

Come home prose poetry and a story to tell^×me with my coffee, kids in the
dell of their own odd communication fornications, as word from generations
line up in my skittled mind's eye, tell me who of you will be Joel or Tadzio
or Randy or the one line of two eyes as the hills of gray concrete roll, and
the summer of August has not yet taken its toll. Come hill tops and come
passion as I look them green gray bright orange red helmets tossed to the
sky of kid hopes when flying was possible down steep hills on their mighty
steeds, and tell me does summer mean as much when there are diets to go on,
when there are stairs in come winter that are easily used to break a bone.
And thinking these thoughts, he came to me again, and put his arms round me,
my own, my only, my true love and friend.

He puts his hands to the back of my neck and begins to massage my nerves and
I kiss his left hand and feel from me he deserves to be more than a moment
for me though I love him and endear, caught inside the pieces of summer
watermelon and pears and washed down with summer Cokes and the hell with
calories and sugar then, and Moon Pies and bare chests and summer children
never die, and he leans over me and puts a kiss to my cheek. He tells me he
is autumn. I tell him he is still quick.

And he asks too quickly for you? I smile and say you taste and smell of warm
morning bread, so he says I'll get the coffee for me too, do you need
anything else? I say bread in bed and harvests of silver harps and decency
and courage and the first time Doug Spaulding knew he was alive and that
shivery feeling I got when I first saw the movie of "To Kill A
Mockingbird"^×the child drawings and the crayon and the whistling and I broke
apart then, and mostly I need you in my bed with your legs draped over my
shoulders and my heart beating to yours, silver lakes and fine hummings and
sounds of lawn mowers even though they are all rider mowers and that seems
unfair and I tell him he is  my boychoir, but don't let it go to your head,
as he smiles and cuffs me a bit on the arm and he looks out the window and
speaks with false alarm, how will they get on?, he asks with a glance, I'll
tell you how they will, if you truly want to know, and he says yes as if in
a trance of August stand still where you're not sure your age or your
stance, so I say they will fall in love and they will have sex and they will
blow each other and they will fuck and they will die inside when it doesn't
work and then they will meet true love and that will surely be forever and a
day, but all of us pay, in the eyes of going already away, so he looks at me
and kneels to me,  naked I suddenly see, and he asks where were the
groundhogs, under or over, when my muddled cynicism was created and re-born
every minute a little worse each time?  So I tell him to get the coffee
without delay, and he brushes my hand with his penis and goes into the
darker day of the house and I sit and consider what have I been complaining
about, and then I remember he's not there at all, and foolish men are
cynical men because they dream and it's a package deal, not one without the
other, fish in different streams, if the connection of total opposite is not
your brother, as I finish my coffee and put the mug on the computer table,
as I think what will I write about today and try to make new.

The boy/man who was just here, who could have had wings of gold or green
like insect wings and rushed off into the sky, a boy on a bike on a long
steep hill, going down, who knows any second he will take off and fly to the
moon Alice and beyond the furtherest furtherest stars and stop just a second
to take a million year breath, and this boy/man has been sharing my head and
my hand and my heart and my dreams and my tears and my pleas of don't I beg
you, don't go, and he holds me together and knits me into kites and I go
sailing with him over clouds in November bites, as though there were nothing
in me before him or since, as though he were there moreso than the boys on
their bikes long gone, whatever happened to banana seats on bikes?

Haven't seen one of those in ages; something that suddenly bugs me; about
which I am suddenly offended and outraged; and I long to find out the
answer, and thus make my cause banana seat bikes, but happily my dream has
brought me hard as only he can do, and I think of his warm bread smell and
taste in our bed waiting for me, and I wonder if kids still get hard when
they ride bikes, if the intimacy of those very intimate, very hard seats,
that clutches at them so metallically so, that hurts their balls and their
rears and makes their penises rear up, if those memories of mine, are now
mimed in my hands as the turn under my ass and grasp my balls and my penis
doesn't flare up as it did when, outside there was I, and a bike was my
friend; so here we are toward the middle of the morning and I've not written
a word, but have some thoughts to put down.

Mostly, I wonder if the wonderboys out there are not dreams and my dreams
not the realities, surely a hoar ridden mothballed covered up by centuries
thought done to death all over the place, but the sun is so bright and the
grass so green and the cars passing by glint deaths of silver sticks and
swords at my eyes, and I wonder if Woolworth's is having a special today on
just average eyes, in case anyone's misplaced theirs over the years or
dropped them down the drain or something and I spell words on chalk in my
terrible jagged handwritten mind and in my heart.

I spell his name most of all because he's the ark I cling to in the flood of
summer roaring past, and I wish his man arms around me and I wish he could
make it last, but if it lasts much longer I shall in factoid gone to rust,
and all this BREAKING NEWS crap more like BREAKING WIND, how much drivel to
endure, and there is a pillage of the world I used to know even just a hand
full of years ago, as I sit for a time, looking out glass, wondering if
bicyclers will come back again at long last, and help me remember the
measurement of lime green sherbet on a hot summer  night, or home made ice
cream, how  taste buds feel in flight, and new Superman comic books and
Green Lantern and Batman too, at the local Kroger, and movies where were
held hand in hand in secret.

As I pretended Jimmy sitting next to me and Kathy to the right might let me
say I love them before walking away in floundered consternation, and I wish
my dream here and I wish myself gone because one would think a bike ride
would be needed after such a long lawn to mow by hand or motor too, and I
want to be a kid again, could the mighty minds so round me order it?

And I want to be on my black Schwinn bike heading down the long hill to town
and at the end of the street, right next to the stop sign, I can see him
now, down there and waving and happy to see me all there with my heart in my
throat and the cool winds blowing my long hair, and my eyes half sealed shut
by the speed and friction I go, and rush toward a moment, and feel it spring
so cushiony and springily alive and good for all the space in existence, as
I head with my feet hard on the brakes, my boy body like a wind leaf,
fearful of not being able to stop, and he's there and my mouth screams his
name greenly into the once summer air and his mouth says my name so surely
and sweetly, in the now November air as my bike  hits a rock and I tumble
free, thinking oh God, not now, not this entry to lost now forever memory,
don't kill it for me, not now, I've waited so long, don't you see? I've paid
my dues. I've done my time. I've given subsistence to idiocy all of my own
doing, except some parts, here and dappled there.

And His hands and arms catch me and he holds me and I feel him, I feel love
that has substance and who delights in feeling me too, I also have substance
suddenly, I had not known before, and he tells me I'm like poetry, that I
taste and smell like a writer he never forgot and we hold each other tightly
and I know what to write now, mostly to write about being not.