Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 21:10:36 -0600
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: M/B "Then There Was Joel"

			   "Then There Was Joel"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman

 It was the autumn of Joel. Cold winds and gray skies. And long hair, bell
bottom blue jeans, happy friends and the season of love. The autumn of
peace signs and Peter Maxx paintings, Rod McKuen ballads of sad young men,
and `Tiger Beat" with its photos of gentle eyed boys like Leif Garrett with
tender skin and slept on their beds with pillows lucky young girls who
would enter the contest would have a chance of winning. Leif, whom Joel
resembled. The moon in Aquarius, and Joel's face in that cool night star
sky. Love that was said in the name "Joel." Magic scarves of colors I had
never seen before.

A boy of tender long neck, soft feminine gestures, 13 years, to my 21, and
deep brown eyes.  A caring compassionate boy. Intelligent and made with
dreams. He was my first love. My secret love. Our song, though he didn't
know it, was "American Pie." Which I sang, brokenly, on my ride back from
his parents' farm in Fulton, after visiting him in his room, each Saturday
night. Where we sat on his bed, close together, and leafed through science
fiction magazines, and he read me his poetry. And broke my heart so gladly.
A sweet face, dusky he had and hands with long expressive fingers I longed
to touch.

I was his shadow in the two years I knew him. I wept when I was gone from
him each time. I carried his letters and his photograph with me during the
week until I could return to him for a few more hours of revelation. I held
his image in my mind and heart and knew he could keep me safe through all
the winters of my life. Oh he looked like Mark Lester and Bjorn Andresson.
That same kind of leaping imagination, squiggling happy and tender you want
me, don't you? smile. And the neck chain of thin silver, that was so sexual
on him to me.

The first time I met him was late summer. He was shirtless. My eyes on his
thin chest and his slight orange little nipples that I so longed to kiss.
How I wish I could lay my head on those little dusky nipples now. I
believed I could see his heart breathe. I wanted it to be mine.

I stood so close to him that day, my erection hurting, that I could almost
feel his chest's warmth. His jeans low on his hips, almost down to the
beginning of the v of his concave pubic region. His short height and his
slender arms as he touched himself at his chest center and laughed happily
when we found we had this silent, never mentioned thing, in common. My
utter devotion to him. His kindness because he knew I needed a friend.

Mostly I remember going away from him which was going to him. Our two years
together.  My drive home each visit, getting lost on the country lanes.
Saying "I love you Joel" when he wasn't around. And his sometimes visits to
my house. I wrote a newspaper column at the time. Once he leafed through
them. While I danced on a record spindle, hoping, see the hidden words of
them, Joel. His body as happy as a lovely complex infinite song. So I
imagine now, as I imagine then, that lyric that was Joel and how it could
have been if we had been in his room alone in his house one autumn night.
If he had touched out to my shoulder in my turning away. If he had let me
hold his elegant fox shaped face. And he had said,

"Let's make love."

And as we kneel on his bed, arms round each other, our hair long to our
shoulders in the yellow light of his bedside table, shadow comfortable, our
shirts being tugged off, unsheathing merman and merboy, the sweet breath of
him on me, I can feel his slim thin hips under my hands as I reach behind
him and hold him to me. His abdomen against my mouth as I unzipped his
jeans tight and small as he did the same for me. His little hard on that
curved a bit at the top of the shaft, like a Lilliputian banana, standing
firm, warm, hot under my hands, and his hands in my hair, studying me,
wondering at me.

And I can see all the stories of childhood in his body and hold his
throbbing beating chest to mine, as we roll to opposite sides of the bed
and take off tennis shoes and socks and pull off our blue bell bottomed
jeans, I, trying hard to look like so very much like Keith Partridge, and
we tumble into each other. Sweet love hay. The smell of hay and grass and
autumn cool outside his window. The occasional lowing of one of the cows on
his farm.

 As we roll on the bed narrow like him and friendly soft and beckoning
safety and sleep and that kind of peaceful hope that every young person
seemed to live in back then, the pain of tomorrow hanging its gremlin sign
on someone else. Never on us. And it is so extraordinary to be naked with
him. My forest faun. My gamin with the smile that lights up the world and
the hands that travel over me and tell me topography and one way do not
have to forever blend. That there is time when the sad jokes halt a bit.

Because strangers in strange lands found each other back then. Always the
background of "Moonshadow" and "I Think I Love You" vaguely in the
background. How we all wanted in those days to go to San Francisco with
flowers in our hair. For then all was a strange land. And even I was on
occasion not summarily turned away. We tell each other sex stories of
golden blonde boys who find the seasons of love inside themselves like on
an endless merry go haunting melody in them. That great longing clinging to
of bodies. Sights and souls and needs and little mercies so unashamed.  In
fantasy memory, I taste the territory that goes into making up life in him.

How his mouth with his pale lips love rests with trembling confidence, and
he tips his tongue to my face, that makes me giggle. Our arms round each
other. And we put our foreheads together and laugh just at the joy of
being. as I rush my hands down to his groin that is filled with such
straining life.  That little coral finger apparatus of him that plays,
dances at my finger tips. That stroke it. That touch the curve of it and
shivers his whole body as I take it. As my eyes are drawn down to the geese
flying north V of him and I hold his chest to mine. As our penises rub
together. And he laughs silken feathers into my shoulder.

And such thin whispery arms that hold to me and fingers artistic and pale
that dance on my skin as he examines himself in my eyes. As he looks down
at himself and is so lovingly naked. So proudly young boy bare. As though
he has never been naked like this before. As though all his life he has
seen himself just in his own bedroom and bathroom mirror. Ashamed to be a
kid. Ashamed to be small--down there. And here he tells me of his
unsureness of himself. His secret sweet hurt pain.

The other children made fun of him for being small. Looking girlish. And he
has always felt dark inside. Always felt, forgetting his defenses, wrong.
Always hiding in books. But now the dancing light and shadow show of his
bedroom are on and he giggles as I say,

"You are the most beautiful boy who ever lived."

 I kiss his lithe soft milky skin and he is boy supreme and delighted in
himself and he holds me and searches my own body for the clue to himself.
My longer body with its much paler skin and my six inch penis that he finds
in his dimensions large. He lies me a moment on my back and he stares down
at me as I reach up for his thick sun hair and find the sky of his eyes
anointing me. He lays his head on my chest. And traces the glow of himself
that is filtering into me. And smiles at me. And cuddles on top of me. His
thin bony hips I feel with my hands. The dimple of them. The utter joy of
this boy child from a forest that says safe, that says stay.

He is moonlight moved in to his bedroom. He can find the bones of my spine
as I find his. My memory of him now is of snapshots. Non-sequential.  He
poses. He mugs for me. He kneels on the bed and he plays with himself and
pulls on his nipples and shoots out his tongue. He is coy and he is sad. He
is the way songs ended in the seventies. Holding hands. Believing the light
would never really dim. Because we were there. That was the why of it.

 He holds my penis and he brings it to his lips and he breathes on it,
making it quiver and he examines the bands of pale brown colors on it. He
tickles my balls and tongues the little ridge between my legs. My legs
scissoring round his waist. And then he takes his own turn at that...  And
lost in our love grottos, he tells me stories of campfires and
possibilities and bookworms where his fingers danced for a time on the page
and then on the crotch of his Levis jeans, and he is Friday afternoon after
school when he runs from a knot of other children in the cold school
ground, shouting he would see them Monday, and then ran to my car, smiling,
and ducked inside. For I come to pick him up, to take him home, where we
can spend, uninterrupted the entire weekend. And I feel the soul of this
boy and he presses his chest into me and our griefs and midnight sadnesses
and tricky wild woods of love to find are one.

Pleasuring himself and warming himself even on my cold no longer body. He
pouts so prettily. And he rubs himself so three inch hard, and then turns
to me, offering me his penis. Which I take in my hands while it is still in
his, and he is a magic lantern. Before the movies learned how to talk.
Before there was time and motion. Only his legs silken and his eyes of doe
and his lashes of Bambi. There is such happy exposure of himself. There is
not one inch of his body that is not dusted with light and shadow turned
just right.

This creamy covering that holds inside the boy I will forever love. And he
holds me to his carnival bones and he is dancing his fingers down his
abdomen where I rest my head in sleepy seeming abandon. He "demands" that I
lick his penis. I do. That I kiss the slit of it. I do. He demands that I
let him lie me back and he kisses my soft black pubic hair. He looks at it
longingly. A moment I try to forget.

He is sleep and time one and he is that one more moment when there is
nothing left but giving up the ghost, as Henry Miller wrote it, and finding
love in the apertures of the boy's body. Name of Joel. Name of freedom and
pastel love signs wherever I was to go in the time of him. In the winsome
wildness of his penis so tiny and so perfect and we examine it together. We
examine it and I suck his pebble pink balls.

And I tongue the ridge between his legs. I look up at him. At the
surprisingly long body of so seemingly short boy when dressed. Nudity does
that to a child. It makes him more somehow. And we are friends for life. I
rush up to him and I consider the rising lilac beauty of his chest and he
rushes his hands through my long hair and kisses it and puts the side of
his face next to mine and it feels so truly wonderful. Warm and bone and
pulses beating together. Love songs that are right. Peace that is a glowing
golden in the center of both of us.

That sweet tang of eternal blue skies in his eyes that do not shatter when
they look at me like windows thrown down too hard, but are kind and
friendly and happy to see me there.

He raises his delicacy to me like a moment of dream delivered unsurely at
my door. And he shies away a bit from me. We are together. I holding his
tummy to my mouth. He a bridge of boy, a bridge of ardor and passion.

"Do you know I absolutely adore you, Joel?"

And he smiles and his nose crinkles and there is just a freckle or two
across it. He is blonde and the dip of his tender sleek crotch is against
my own, my heavier penis ashamed at his profoundly little and painterly
one, my older body ashamed at its terribly many flaws and imperfections. I
touch my fingers around his necklace. I touch a boy who is now 13.

 Who is so unsure of sureness and so delighted as I place his legs round my
neck and I sup on him and I nuzzle him like a pet puppy who will do exactly
what he wishes I would do. And we are moments. He strains at one point on
his stomach his chest to the air and he curves his little buttocks like a
bit of crescent moon and his penis is hard between him and my hand and the
bed on which we lay.

We say secrets. We say we will not forget. We say remember me. And he is
all invitation. He loves me and I rub his body with soft warm liquid
fragrant soap from his mom's supply. He feels so good and slippery in my
hands, as I trace his back and he breathes softly as though he were more
than the son of an university professor, as though he were more than the
best student in his school, as though he were more than a boy who writes
lovely poetry and aims to be an architect someday. He is song and sonnet
and couplet and rhyme. He revels in himself as I bring him almost off with
his penis arches like a suspended sentence between my liquid bathed and
mouth. And he wishes to cum.

"No, Joel, first we get the soap off. Have you ever come that way?"

He shakes his head no. Uncertain. But in control even then. New confidence.

"It hurts like anything. The soap getting inside your slit. I jacked off
when I was nine or so in the bath. I just knew the soap on my hands and
rubbing on my little stiffie felt so good. Then I dry came. And god did it
hurt."

I take the warm cloth we have put on the night stand and wash the soap off
him.  He giggles at the sensation. And looks at my face to imagine me a
nine year old boy. And we feel even more sexual at that running through the
years of me, down even to before his own age. Impossible. Scratching
infinity in a way. Giggly both of us.

Still though, I stop him from coming because he is running away from me
even as he is there. He is running away even as he now soaps my body which
is so still and silent in the haunted house of itself suddenly, and my
penis which he rubs with the cloth so delicately. Like it's important that
it be done this way.

He is fresh scrubbed farm and lack of mockery and full invention and cock a
whirls in his hand and mine. He closes his eyes and he rubs my abdomen with
the warmth of his choir boy face. He is winter coming soon. He is proud of
himself, of his body, for the first time. He lies within my protection. I
lie within his.

"If anyone messes with you, ever, Barry, you let me know, okay?"

He is brave and gentle and fragile as a fawn just seeing the world for the
first time. I kiss his fingers and I kiss his legs and his knees which have
scrapes on them for he is learning from his father how to ride a
motorcycle. But he is not the motorcycle type, not yet. He dazzles and
flexes his wonderfully puny arm muscles at me and we both collapse in heaps
of laughter. Laughter as a combustible thing.


As woods to set on fire in our hearts and warm our chilled nights. His face
so dear and our talk serious for a while. So serious and so complex and our
tongues tasting each other. My mouth stroking his chest as I kneel in front
of him and hold him back from me, my arms round his spine as though he is
growing from me and will never turn a decibel different, and later I will
powder puff pink talcum and baby lotion on him. To be washed off after in
the shower.

Suds and boy and blonde and penises and soaping everywhere, making
ourselves up properly, and boy secrets traded without dare or fear as warm
water cascades on us and blends us together.

But first this, and our seriousness in playful voices starts in earnest.

"Will you ever leave me?"

"Yes. I will leave you."

"Will you forget?"

"Never."

"Everyone says that."

I mean it."

Everyone always says that too."

Which of us said what. I don't remember. We were one for a moment and his
bed that framed him on the bright patterned gaily mauved cover and our legs
entwined as though we were each other giving lovely fragrant wine to our
true love. And he naked was all smiles and all teeth so white and all legs
and gesticulating arms and he mantised me and leapt on me and he rode me
piggy back. And he was the totality of whatever little portion of the world
I would take as mine, if it would let me. And we hugged.

And we were pals and we wrestled and sat beside each other and in front of
each other, our foreheads touching, our arms around each other, our penis
struggling against each other, our bodies so close and so tender, yes, even
mine back then. And he lay on the bed so I could kneel at the bottom of it
and take his penis in my mouth and lave it with my tongue.

"I don't think I will ever get pubic hair," Joel said, sadly, our eyes
closed as we lay with each other and I breathed him and he cradled me and
we forgot who the man and who the boy.

"Joel, you will. Yes, much too soon. And the saddest thing of all is you
will be happy then.

"I will, yes." He said, mused, determinedly.

And there, the leaving of the train. And there, the years running in to
take winter away and return with a boy who would seem more summer to
everyone around him in the years ahead. To everyone but me.

The cage of bone and ribs that divided his chest into bifurcation. The
lovely warm solidity of the underside of the cage of this boy who was the
songbird that cage was meant for, that the cage was meant to protect but
would instead as the years lengthened and the yards grew dimmer even in his
memory deny him and hold him prisoner, as mine holds me so.

But now the anticipation as I rub the lotion onto his buttocks and feel the
plains of him and the dimples above, that lovely kissable cleft. And I put
my head on his butt and he giggles for he's heard all the stories from all
the boys who think they know so much, but actually know nothing at all.

And I rub his penis as it salutes like a tiny soldier greeting the end of
young boys going to a place named Vietnam and never coming back again.
Something so maddenly acceptable to so many persons, so much more
acceptable than what we did that night. How insane.

And it is so exciting to feel him there, turned on his tummy, beneath my
hand and his rubbing his penis on his bed, mimicking fucking. I trace the
all of him then. To be there when he is somewhat seemingly helpless. That I
could engulf him in me and I could carry him all ready and forever a young
boy to a Tao free verse place where there are chinaberry trees and soft
swinging paper lanterns.

To where there are songs from rivers and seas that had never existed
before, that sing in tongues never known before, in words that say cease
and peace and harvest home. There in the fantasy lands he loved to read
about. In the bed where we lay and talked about tomorrows the way two
children talk about them.

I rub his buttocks and I run my hands down his abdomen and turn him over
and he is new light each time. There are new pathways each time. I kiss his
arm pits and I tongue his soul as best I can. I want to be everything to
him as he is and always will be everything to me. I place my hand on his
hot cock and balls and they are sweet and smooth and they seem like two
eggs of fairy tale birds that Sinbad might find on one of his many voyages
into contentment and satiation.

And we tease each other and our cocks are together and we tower with each
other. We arch into a sky that has been waiting for us for so long that it
thought a million more years might pass before we came to rescue it from
all the others who had failed and failed some terrible more.I brush the
hair out of his eyes. Heart photos come to me again. He poses with his
jeans half on and half off, one side down to almost his penis, then the
next.

He teases and he laughs as he destroys me and rebuilds me cell by cell,
bone by bone. I had never known bones could be sexual, sensuous before
Joel. I had just concentrated on the usual suspects of bodily parts. But he
is the enigma of love and sex, and when he puts his shirt on, after having
taken his jeans off, he tears my heart and puts it back together in ways
not the greatest poet could ever explain. He cradles himself and he dances
his chest and abdomen and navel and penis at my face in tingling
anticipation.


He is dance and he dances round his little bedroom with the overflow of
books, the Kurt Vonnegut books stacked by his bed. Kurt Vonnegut then such
a cult writer who years later wrote in a story "it is best not to get
tangled up in a boy. Indeed.) on the shelves, and the overflow of papers
that have his poems and notes for poems on them. There is childhood in this
room. There are children's books and there are toys and a Monopoly game
leaning next to a book shelf to the left of the bed. I beg him to take his
shirt off. He dances farther from my skittering fingers.

"Please, Joel" I beg.

And he dances further away. His shirt tail right above his naked, so
unrelievedly sex, groin. His little pearl penis hard and bouncing happily
up and down as he dances to his own secret tunes that no one else in the
world will ever hear inside that bird like fragile china head of his with
eyes so large and warm and skin so fetchingly and tightly taut.

 I almost fall off the bed, catching for him like he has turned into a moth
and I am afraid he will fly up to the light fixture in the center of the
ceiling and be burned to death before me and flame down like candy paper
and writing rules and magic spells cast on flash paper and done and gone
and exploded into confetti of only old dreams getting the sprocket torn out
of them yet again by those who know best.

And Joel sneaks to me as I lose him, and he is shadow and heart and warmth
in this room that is too warm now, that is making both of us now sweat
uncomfortably.

"Joel!!"

I scream as he rushes toward me and it seems he is rushing away instead. He
holds me and I am weeping and he puts his hands on my shoulders. He walks
to the window across from us and opens it letting in the cooling autumn
breeze.

He returns to me. He returns and he is going away and you can't love
anybody because they just go away on you and you live with ghosts and the
ghosts hate you for what you do to them but you have no other choice
because you've got to get through it somehow to the other side if there is
one.

And he holds me tightly against his baby oil smeared scented lilac and boy
sweaty body. And his penis is against my chest, high up. And I take it as
though it were the last moment of essential life I would ever hold and it
would be ever so long getting back to it in dream and in what comes after
dreams.

And his body moves mine somehow. He lies on the bed before me. On his back.
He spreads his tender luscious legs. His feet are small and his toes are
tiny. And he lies his arms back behind him, his hands cupping the crown of
his head. And he says, "look at me. Look at all of me."

And his voice is small like a little motive that happened a long time ago
and somehow he is still bearing the confused brunt of it. And I look at
him.At his lightly sculpted face. At his winning smile, no more to be sad
at ho how he looks, as his necklace that throbs my dick more with
impatience than ever before, as his delicate tracery of ribs and his arms
that have no muscles to speak of and his chest that is a line of curved
bones and traces of large blue veins that make gold in my hands.

And the end of his rib cage like a smile on either side that invites me to
go to his abdomen and his navel in which I tickle my tongue and he washes
inside with laughter that has the fluidity of a drink of water I would try
to catch in my hands, or that of a kitten jumping across the room on
magical pawed wings that I touch the fur of but the kitten itself drink of
water come to life always escapes me.

And his thighs that are little columns of pride that make him walk and run
and dash and rush and stand impatiently still while some teacher goes on
and on about nothing at all when the three p.m. bell has already rung and
it's time to go home, dammit. His groin that is that autumn of flying geese
in mid November skies.

 And the little lines of him that link all this wonder to the stalk of him,
to the praise of him, and his balls beneath his little entrancing pink
penis with the head like that of a spear and a slit I kiss time and again.
I trace my hand down him, down his abdomen and to his penis and I put his
penis in my mouth and find it yearning. And he puts his hand to my penis
and finds it equally so. I turn him over or he turns himself over and I
trace his bony spinal column and I reach between his legs and I touch his
penis and balls again. It is so good to feel him this way.

To feel between his legs and hold his buttocks and touch the little button
of him in front. And lie on him, my comparative heaviness meant not to hurt
him. I kiss the side of his face and he leans up and kisses my mouth. Then
there are butterfly kisses. And he swan dives up to tomorrow. We turn to
each other, and now sit up and stroke each other. And we kiss the salt and
the love into our lips and tongues even more deeply.

"I've never gone all the way," Joel says, his voice trembling a little,
shy, but with a sly smile in it.

"I think just being here like this is all the way. Maybe?" I say and ask,
trying to sound like a big shot.

Don't let me be sad anymore."

I kiss the limits of him and he kisses the limits of me.

"Sadness, Joel, I guess is sometimes good. I guess it
is. Sometimes. Because then when happiness comes on again, it feels just
that much more wonderful."

"Make me cum, Barry. Please make me cum now."

I take the tissue off the side table. He had put it there for me. For he
had not ejaculated yet. This worried him, for he thought he was old enough,
and he was ashamed of that. I'm his friend, he tells me, and promises me to
keep it a dark secret. He puts his head in the crook of my shoulder bone
and dwells within me and leans on me, what a sweet and strange feeling that
was, and I massage him.

He thrusts his little cock into my hand and it is so hot, both are so warm,
so sweet feeling, and it is the dream I'm catching this moment. It is the
dream and the magic of an autumn night that just feels so oddly warm and
safe even when there is cold North in it that you want to let go of
everything and everyone and just drift and depend on promises because
somehow now, at this moment, promises do not carry the fear of death in
them, the fear of betrayal.

And he cums. He shoots a lovely little lake in my cupped palm. I am
Gulliver so high away, in happiness and in redemption, and Joel is my sweet
love. My lovely Joel. My heart breaking Joel in the process of going away
as he comes to me. In the process of filling my hand with his thick white
sperm. The train moving on as I held him and time and destiny and gravity
back and begged all the float us here in this memory bubble forever and a
day. I had not used the Kleenex. Always Kleenex in boy's bedrooms. and in
his surely from now on. I held the warm thick soapy boy smelling liquid in
the palm of my hand I held up to him. I look at him.

His eyes are so wide. His unbelieving smile so large. "My god. I came.
That's the first time I ever came. My god! I really busted a nut on that
one."

And I hold his evidence of coming manhood to him as he touched it
tentatively and told me to take it away cause it was really gross. And I
said I was so happy for him, even though it made me sadder than sad. He
said again, get rid of the stuff.  But not until he had looked at it once
or twice more and smiled up at me so keenly. And after I came back to him,
he lay like a beribboned angel who was so in love with his body and with
himself, but kindly so, gently so and respecting others' feelings and their
own self fears, and he lay back now and he breathed hard.

His inner thighs closed around mine. And I lay on this sensual and lithe
and graceful and catlike and evanescent and glowing and smiling boy who let
me be his world for a moment or two, until he went out into a world made
specifically for him, that was waiting for him and the people who were to
love him and make him their own.

And the sunny fields of autumn dangled beneath me and after he rested and I
kissed the sides of his body, his chest and legs, then, his hand worked on
me for a time.

"Not yet."

Confused. "Don't you want to?"

"I want it to last. I want this moment for the train that is coming into
the room right now."

"Train?"

He laughed and he was a doubloon of immense rarity as I raised and stroked
and tenderly ministered to his little body. As I arched him and turned him
and felt him and fed him my love.

"This is a farm. We don't have trains here. You have to go 15 miles to
Fulton to get a train."

"Hear it, Joel?"

"What?"

"The wind.

"So?"

"It's autumn and the cold wind blows."

He looked up at me and I kissed his fingers and nuzzled his neck. He looked
at me as though I had flipped my lid.

"It's only the wind and the wind is cold in autumn, Barry. Come on. Get
real."

I smiled down at him and I put the top of my head under his lightning fall
leaf chin that was always bouncing up and down as he told stories and
imaginings, as he came to know me, a little more each time, though not
tonight. Tonight our feelings and our silent bodies made that sad kind of
Charlie Brown poetry that was so popular then, that was bouncing out the
window and into the wind. That sounded like a train coming. The train he
would himself hear one day in autumn brown leaf swirling injustice, or
perhaps, after all, justice, coming. And remember or not remember. But for
now he was a golden boy in a golden room and I was his servant, his court
jester, and I did not defile him nor corrupt him nor utilize him.

I made love to him and I can feel right now our groins kisses each
other's...  And I told him a bit about the topography of poetry and
photographs made holographs and holographs made real, things I knew
absolutely nothing about.

And he was drifting off to sleep for a bit, safe in my arms.He asked me as
he dropped off and I lingered and saw him fall asleep for it was a
beautiful dying swan performance to watch, and thus to keep watch over him
while he did sleep, he asked me to teach him how to take photographs and
make them forever and how to write "really good poetry.

Which made me smile. I caressed the tendons of his shoulders. The white
delicacy of his neck.

"You already know how, Joel. You already know how. Be so very glad you are
Joel. Be so very glad you are absolutely--perfect." And now, writing these
things about him, I would add, if I could, to him, "Joel, who is still
loved by me. For whatever little it counts, old friend. For whatever little
it counts."

	Love,
	 Barry

 In a scary long away future, who comes here often to remember the art of
autumn and long hair and bell bottom poetry and college professors with
their hair tied in pony tails and girls and women who wore little sewn
patches of the American flag on a back pocket of their jeans. Long gone and
still my heart.

My Joel. Whisper words of his voice, soft and willowy and a bit shadowed
then by his water color delicate feelings and dreams. Yesterday and
tomorrow. Whom I run to, then and now. Please hurry, Joel, please hurry.