Retro Invite Only

Sorry Britney, there's somebody on the other line
Hit me baby, some other time, perhaps
-Alexander Graham Bell

The place felt like Brooklyn heights, someone said, but I disagreed having never been there, and decided to eavesdrop on someone else's conversation instead. This time the poet who I fear and despise. Mostly just fear. Tall, wide slanted green eyes, eating with her fingers and sucking both the meat out of the crabs and the jealous spite out of everyone nearby with her charm. They all hated her. The poser. The success story in a sea of Punk Scene Princesses who make up in mascara what they lack in social conformity.

He kisses her on her mouth
She says save it for the stage
Oblivion swirling in her cigarette smoke
the fools, the bastards, the women
fighting men as flames arise
such a juxtaposition, this life
with its invisible music, in visible blood
hearts lie all around
the mosh pit, dying.

I read on the wall. This is her party. Scrawling violent drip-ink splatter sketches on the minimalistic gallery surroundings and each with its own poem beneath. I've been invited because we once dated. Briefly. Not really. We made out. A couple times. So much of love is circumstance. She had asked me what the deal with the mask was.

"We all wear masks," I had said.

"Symbolically right, in the little white lie sense. But why are you actually wearing a mask?"

"Trying to get away from things, I guess. Trying to fit into the river of darkness. I just want everyone to be happy."
She took a strong swig of a weak drink and eyed me like I'd been standing by the door all night and just come into focus. I had. But that's how she had looked at me. And then her cell phone beeped and the ambient bar noises suffusing the air rose and howled like a train and I stepped out for a smoke in the solemn solitude of the cathedral black city night sky. Half a million thoughts in my head. Which is more impenetrable, the directions of the unknown or the concourses of the human heart?

"Why are you here?" someone asks, ruining the remembrance of things past.

"I'm allowed." I say. I had again walked outside for a smoke. Life imitates flashback. Always, but tonight I'm afraid a look in her eyes would be devastating.

"I wasn't insinuating..."

"I'm card carrying," I inform her, "I have my poetic license. Wanna see?" I reach down to cup my crotch but she simply laughs plaintively and walks away into the luminous emptiness of the party. Me and my sepulchral party sense. Overhearing two women talking about their sons,

"The boys are getting so big... so much stronger. I hope they make it to the finals," and suddenly I have a vision of the world as a nuclear wasteland of both proud and slouching storefront mannequins all blank eyed and blindly going through the motions of their daily lives, not knowing that they're selling something (themselves) in the display cases of time.

"The problem with wearing a mask is that you want to be somebody else, and you fail to recognize that their problems may be worse than your own." A feminine voice like liquid steel; hot, wet, and burnt-egg sulphuric, "the kind of problems that leave you shaking long into the imperturbable nights."
It was her. Come out to have a smoke with me. The girls within didn't seem to mind her absence. Easier to snarkily criticize her exhibition with her out of earshot.

I felt homesick and out of place. I felt a feverish heat venture out all over me in tiny little ringing waves. She saw further into me than I was comfortable with, and I suspected that she could see further still, over yon mountain, compromising even my deepest darkestmost defenses, and I wanted out of the light. "Nice of you to come," she said, and kissed me.

I have kissed Brazillian girls, their tongues acting little forcible reacharound subterfuges.
I have kissed French girls, in tempestuous sweeps and whorls that are perquisite preludes to hotly anticipated nothings.
I have kissed Danish girls, and been carried away by by their intrinsic shifting surls and deep deadly twitters.
I have kissed Korean girls, light as a feather and softer than solace.
I have kissed Italian girls... sigh...
I have kissed South African girls, mutely mouthing endless words without meaning all the while...
...But her kisses were the epitome of elegantly crafted detachment. Her kisses left me parched and dry of free association. Her kisses you couldn't practice for; and it would split your heart to dream about them.

"You didn't call me back," she says.
"Buy me a drink," I offer raggedly, pouring out the words like hiccups.

Gesture. Step. Smile. Together we glide back into the party. Everyone is looking at you. Everyone whispering scalding little critiques. You're with her, she looks immaculate and where did you come from? You look like a schlub. Speckled brown jacket. Horrible gray pants. Bad-mannered, not very witty. Say something witty!

"Tom Collins," I say. "Tom Collins is a dry drink. Billy Collins is a wet poet."

Lame. She doesn't laugh. She sits huskily, looking at me clear and pure, making me want to melt into the shadows.   "Still wearing the masks I see," she says, "what are you hiding from these days?"

"I like telling people I've read books that I haven't. Saying I went to better schools. You know..." The world is a big place. There should be room for all of us, both who we are, and who we wish we could be.

"I thought you didn't finish school..."

"Yeah, well..." I think back to one of my own poems:

I'm neck deep (in water)
"Is it love?" she asks
"Is this the Ocean?" I retort
I just can't tell anymore

"...I just can't tell anymore."

When one door closes, fuckin' reopen it!
- Fergie