It is her wedding

It is her wedding and I am drunk It is her wedding and it is August and who gets married (really) in the swelter of august (really) if you stop to think about it for a moment. It is her wedding and I can almost guran-fucking-tee you that he has written maybe a tenth of the epistolary tithes I have sent her by way of US mail.

It is wedding and I am out the money I saved up to visit her in Spokane even though she insisted that I can come in and walk her down the aisle.

It is the day of her wedding and I take the disc out of the CD player and listen to the Smiths, listening to unlovable, feeling black on the outside because black is how I feel on the inside.

It is her wedding and I quote the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock aloud. I quote Ezra Pound.

I quote Anne Sexotn.

It is her wedding and as much as I just want to run this season via Cross country I don’t want to come up short the way I have suddenly the last two seasons.

The way I seem to come up short when I spend all night studying for an exam and find myself getting a B.

It is her wedding and I am a Christian. I have not heard from Mark all summer although I have spoken with his cool roommate Matt on the phone several times.  

It is he wedding and my future is only community college at best.

The way I came up short when I placed everything inside my chest into the sentence of the page promulgating my adolescent ardor only to discern that she wants nothing to do with me at all.

It is her wedding and more that anything else I just don’t want to fail.

It is her wedding and I already have a few cigars stashed so that, after I fall asleep and wake up at three in the morning I can go outside the ziggurat flavored backstops leading up to the only house I have ever known and have a poetic, albeit pensive smoke.

It is her wedding and I know I should have a teen-age angst ridden ritual where I say a prayer to Kurt Cobain and light incense and burn everything she has ever given me. All the letters. The newspaper clippings. 

It is her wedding day and I start the morning off the way I start each morning and after noon. At our tables in LUMS, the Bohemian gala, smoking, drinking carafe after carafe of caffeinated ambrosia 

It is her wedding and I am in the upstairs bathroom, the cabinet where my father keeps his musk and Old Spice cologne, looking as my face forms triangles in the mirror, crying looking for a small cobalt blue tub.

  

It is her wedding day and I think about how Dawn Michelle told me she is getting married. I think about Renae Holiday breaking my heart in the front seat of her Toyota cruiser last Homecoming, as if recompense, as if she wished vindicating death on me only to somehow reel me in and butcher me again. It is less than three years since I started high school and I never would have imagined that all my friends, including myself, our smokers. It is her wedding day and I think about Katie McQuellen in her wedding dress, yelling at me in her underwear, stating GO Dave! It is her wedding day and I think about Sue Gibson leading the herd from Trenton Wesclin, wanting to kiss the blanche canvass of her forehead, wishing that I had a female friend with whom I can run.

It is her wedding days and I triple the dosage of lithium the doctor who works at AGAPE counseling prescribed.

It is her wedding and  I know I should destroy everything I have from Harmony. 

It is her wedding day and I am naked in the bathroom, the house where two years earlier I spied on the college girl and now lives a white trash couple who is unemployed and who knocks on our door cursing my father our every time someone parks in front of what her perceives to be his driveway even though it is not his property

Even though it is not really  a driveway.

Even though it is on our property.

It is her wedding and  I am massaging my cock.

It is a year later and the New Age meditation shop is across the street at the old Lusanne’s dance studio with Bumper sticker reading I heart Fish Taco and SAVE THE HUMANS.

At night I can hear them chanting mantras about elves.

At night even though it is against the religion of my fathers, I feel at peace and think about Cool Hippie-Bandanna clad Greta from my trip all those years ago when they chant into the distilled cool of the autumnal dusk.

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It is her wedding date and I am officially over Jenny Wilson from last summer.

It is her wedding and the phone rings for a second I think it is Harmony in the Moat House with Jenifer Flood saying something lewd and lecherous. It is her wedding and it feels like the elevator door is opening and I have a stuffed-animal bouquet burrowed behind my back and she performs a little skit when she sees me.   

I rip up a second picture I have of Harmony. She is next to her brother. She is wearing a University of Seattle sweatshirt and has her arms around her brother who has long hair. I the picture her hair is feral and long and her cheeks seem somehow to glisten.  I pace the confetti triangles of the picture into the toilet.

It is her wedding and I am hurting so much.

I can’t live without her.

 It is her wedding and I take another swig of the champagne lost since surrendered its fizzle.

It is her wedding date and I am in the shower, caking my body with a blue tub of noxzema. It is her wedding day and while she is wearing white I am  lathering my body in dollops of white chemical camphor, phenol and eucalyptus in a swath across every modicum of flesh. My chest. My neck. I am groping my penis as if it is a shepherds staff. I am embalming my knee caps. I am patting down the interior flanks of my thighs.

It is her wedding and I am in West Peoria. In the Gloucester. I am experiencing a rift in time-space raffle conducive for the button of the planet. It is her wedding and I am seeing her again for the first time in the variegated flicker of neon lights in Stratford where I am telling Mark not to jump and can’t keep my eyes off of her forehead. 

 It is her wedding  and I am dipping the white cream inside the punctuation mark of my navel.

When I step out of the shower and look in the mirror I look like a human wedding cake with bloodshot eyes, the color of a canned beet.

I am naked cloaked in Noxzema when I hold in front of my vision the picture of her that somehow I feel I can let go of. Somehow I can return.  There is the picture that Mark sent me in his first PopTart letter from the night of the cruise, the dress she wore , the picture that was allegedly snapped by Denis. The first picture you had from Harmony which was taken from the night on the Thames even though it looks nothing like her.

It is her wedding and I am looking at the picture that Mark-Andrew sent of her the night of the dance cruise on the river Thames certain that the other man now was Denis.

Although I have no clue when on the voyage Denis could have snapped the photo.

Perhaps it was when I was out on the deck consulting Sam.

Perhaps it was when Longhorn and Dimas were vomiting over the side of the yacht.

There is Noxzema in my left eye. It is hurting like it hurt at Newark when we said goodbye and the brim of her cheaply marketed chapeau cut into my line of vision.

It is her wedding and I reach down and reel out my cock, almost like it is a fleshy door handle to another world.

I take the photo and I kiss her lips, trying not to think about her husband groping at the top of her wedding dress lowering it into a puddle of ivory below the svelte bulbs of her ankles. 

There are dribbles of urine plopping on her smile. I am thinking about when I was a little kid the Baptismal font at my church always reminded me of a toilet.

It is her wedding and I am peeing on her. 

It is her wedding and I am trying to let her go.

Let her go after all this time.