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Date: Thu, 4 Jul 2002 18:14:58 -0700
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: Joel, Remembered in Amber"

			 Joel, Remembered in Amber

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


"You fill my heart with very special things/a lover's kiss/wild
imaginings/with you along, I won't be lonely/with you along,
who could be lonely?"
Francis Lai


Dear Joel,

Do you remember how it was twixt 13 and forever? Back in
the days when you were a dolphin who swam September
winds and ducked and feinted and came home to silver
worlds that were love songs stretched huge in front of you,
for you to fly over and sing yourself to the secret seas and
grottos of your pale blue eyes? Caught in firebird fancy and
lost in chipmunk smiles, all trundle bedded when the night
came to lay its quiet Fall mantle on you? For if you don't, I
do remember. How you came running into my life and never
left my heart for a minute ever since, how your hair was love
child and your laugh was famous, all the people around
adored you and lived for your next breath which was that of
a fairy elf's.

Danced with grape wine and friendly arms that you would
throw around yourself in gales of self discovery and lights
come bright and not hurting the eyes of me, like the light of
this summer  that makes me almost stumble before I even try
to fall, so come with me, Joel, when the idea, the dexterity of
writing "Dear Joel" filled me with such awe and majesty, that
even my words could thrive and grow under your tender
eyes. Almost as good as me being there. Almost.  The sheer
excesses of your power and your hunger for everything and
everyone. Bobtailing to your mirror and your room and your
comic books, come the season of love, my tinsel tree of
Christmas boy. Touch with your long fingers the longing in
my eyes.

And see the dolphin I dreamt of you as. Come the friendship
bracelet for you and for me, ride the countryside with the
help of your sleek dorsal fin. Let me attend to you and watch
you sleeping, your soft thin bony body, all at the same time,
together, powering you for your next sleep breath, the quiet
movement of your hand to your chest from your side--a
movement of such grace and perfection, it would be worthy
of conducting all the finest symphony orchestras in the
world. And the one in my heart, the secret little child of us
that I carried and carry still, hidden from you, from the need
to kiss the hollow of your hand, the hollow of your elbows,
to know the bone work of why I was put here in this place
and time. To hear your heart in the vault of your inviolate
chest, to hear the turning of the tumbrels I'm still trying to
figure out, trying to touch the correct sequence of sexual
numbers. I do it all the time. Asleep or awake, still that
damnable hopeless hope.

The opening sesame into a rich pink brocade palace that
combines dream and directive of life and a need to finally
open my eyes in the only place I wish to be. To see your
Doric penis arise, the delighted griny boy thrust of ascending
before me and my hands holding onto the insurrection of
love to me alone. The boundless fiefdom of the throbbing
throat of your sex. Imagine. And make it real. I touch in
imagining to your balls and wonder at the life of them they
create in you, the hot throbbing of your engine. By the skin
of my teeth. Trying not to fall. Trying to do exactly the
opposite.

As boys hang in tree houses in their minds alone. Knowing of
wish and love and all the green grow apples in the glow of
your butterwarm smile, and let me touch you with my mind,
my memory, for I have such sore need of you today, this
minute, and let me remember how sadly gloriously happy I
was with you, with the thought of rushing to you, with your
mouth circled around my first name, and trust, and the pen of
the mightiest writer could not create you, the hugeness of
forever could not contain you. All bursting bubble naked
quiet boy, contemplative boy, studying sexuality as much as
you studied chemistry and biology and all those classic lit.
books your father created in you the need to read. For sake
and sound mind, for chamber music in the distance, hear me
now, back all those years, my first and true and for always
love, the dolphin boy who conquered many hearts and then
turned and rushed into the forest city of autumn down deep
in the sea.

Leaving myths and fantasies and legends around you and
where you were, and the golden crowns you wore that were
the horns of the sun made and the horns of my dilemma as
well. To kiss you, those papery dry lips, those soft lips that
needed nothing but the harvest home that was deeply inside
you, and the rhetoric of the world sways down, the rhetoric
of the world comes to a crawl and slides bug slowly off,
where it never belonged. Come the lacy interventions, and
the fields we walked, while we talked, you about tomorrow,
me about the love that was a low horizon I could have spun
from my spider dreams that I stole from you, a horizon I
could have jumped to most easily because I had you on my
shoulders. Because I had you on my back.

My sweet monkey boy, to you, and all the children of the
world, I would say don't let them cheat you out of your
childhood. Don't let them talk you into climbing that tall tree
inside you, do not climb the handholds that are not there in
an errant invisible sky, for it is lies  they tell you, that you are
allowed to take yourself there and can deepen the truth; no,
no, stupid and wrong and wasteful up ahead; come back Joel
Dolphin boy, and swim in my dreams naked in the sea, with
garlands of light bright green and gold fish darting around
you. Announcing the secret code of your love and arms and
legs entanglement that have been my refuge since you first
stood next to me. And I wanted to be the tree you climbed.
Your own personal willow song.

Your lovely goofy life slurping kidding around, not caring
what others think, and you lost in my arms while I
worshipped you, and said I adore you, and you warm and
wiggly and happy and electric in my arms, the eels of your
secret self revealed inside me and all quiet alabaster skin and
honey smells of boy run through the autumn coming deeper
and deeper. Repression and depression gone from the
premises, only a necklace of songs around your slim neck,
thin bones that hold the pollen to your lost and changeling
and early morning head. For with you, my Joel, and all the
lights all over the world tonight, keeping darkness at bay,
there will only be early morning, and crisp early cold dew
and mountain winds and clouds that look like parts of your
body taken and rouged in early sun glow and white billowy
hallows of sky marshmallows, manifest and covering with
compassion the whole of the world.

With all of life imitating you and mimicking you. Come close
and smell the moment of yesterday, when you could believe
in something and early on before it was all gone wrong.
Before other people's stupid cruel crude complacent
ridiculous theories, one and all. Black and white--so easy, no
talent to see it all that way. It's like politicians and
evangelists popping off on swearing fealty to God and
country. It calls for no bravery. Me, though? I see only in
shades of gray. I'm never sure. Always hesitant. I've
apologized my way through life. Can one day I finally stop
that, Joel? Will someone finally invent a friggin' time
machine already, for God's sake and get a move on????

How could my love for you even be wrong? Wrong as rain.
No. Not my  sleek seraphic blue night love dolphin whose fin
I held to as you took me through the wine air, as you led me
to your barn where we jumped and climbed in the gold shell
hay, where we lay with our heads close together, all earthy
smells and life aborning, and I tried to get the doggerel right
in my mind, so I could give it to you, the ten pennies that
were the world of words I knew back then, that came out
grass stained and hay  and mouth scared dry and acrid
smelling there in the shadowy pretend of the barn with the
roof lopsided, filled with decay, and crumbling as the sun ate
into it eager to see what we had and what we had was you.

And I longed and lusted and desired and wept long night
hours all round the clock, to be a part of your endless early
morning, when the sea beast came to me and said there are
lands locked under water so deep it is beyond cold and blue
and black, and coral has never been heard of down there, no
matter how pink and ivory and perfect and fine and sheer it
might be, because there are cotton skies to run, and there is
Joel in my mind, right now, running the fields of yesterday,
and you naked with your limp penis and balls bigger (I
imagine once, and then imagine the opposite) than your dick,
so intriguing, that; to have it grow to fit their already heavy
training wheels soon and soon, and your wild wind laughter
on the winds of all the songs there are that he knew simply
by existing. Simply by running through the grass and the hay
and the meadows with me, running for your future, running
for the tree to climb. I am losing ground. I can't catch up. I
have to stop to breathe. There is a stitch in my side. Help me,
Joel!

And the tree me said here I am Joel, climb up and taste
tomorrow, taste tomorrow with me because running through
the door of November and December and winter, you will
not spend them with me or even tossed aside ten pennies of
my love that rolled next to you as though they once were
wagon wheels decked in brocade bunting of happiness
pulling a carnival down the road, trying to catch up with you.
Trying to locate a map that had anything but you on it and
failing over and again.

 Oh Joel, let me feel the opening of your sweet longed for
thighs, let me put my face in the crotch of the branches of
them, and let me explore the road map that came birthing
strong and tender and oldly wise before your time, carrying
only your name. Let me feel your long legs thrumming
power and your long toes stretching and your arms beside
your head, making a boy curve exclamation mark around it,
and let your tongue loose the wildflowers around you,as
your chest is finally there for mine to ease onto, the bed of
gods. Saying goodbye to Fall and hello to the world that we
will laugh at and turn easily on its cauliflower ear, and we
will be us and will be a part of it and never apart again again.

How it was and how it was right and how it broke my eyes
and flooded them with your goodness, your rightness, your
moment that was capsule of love that was never mentioned,
never noticed until a grim Saturday night two years hence.
Touch the floor and let me hold you from the back and trace
the dragon teeth of your bent over spine, with my glad and
grateful hands. Let me feel the warmth of your buttocks, the
tender heart melt unadorned defenseless back entrance into
you. And my reaching round to your slim summer popsicle
cock and its tiny perfectly flesh circle BB balls  (all Julys in
the world there is to be contained in them, to the small heft,
to the penis that giggles with just your voice, as it elongates
along with the sound of moan from your excited no longer
tentative mouth) you thrust into my hands landlocked of
amazement, as though you know the ready steady go is into
the arms I have already holding around you.

Touch and test and taste the days as the Fall calendar clicks
and gone for good and away,  bicycle tire spokes clicking
down their own special private blue highways into the pearly
illusions of too teethy tomorrow where she will be waiting,
where she will supplant my role, my lead, my bit part, and
you will find your way to her heart. And thus be allowed.

But now is my finality and that is the luck of the draw, and I
cling to you at night and I hold you in my far less than clever
dreams, for I pray to the magic that made you, that one clear
eye of God who has gotten so much of so many so wrong
since, for when I masturbate, I think of you. When I rub
myself against my bed, it is you I pretend to. When I dream
or read or watch the day passing my door, I dream of you. I
dream of skies that our eyes saw, both of us, at the same
time. I dream of the little jokes we giggled into life, and the
little world of me that you took under your wing and held to
your side as though you knew how much I wanted you to
count, how much I wanted you to know you were the end
reacharound of  glistening melancholy parfait Sundays and
the seas gobble the dolphins and dolphins die too and they
lose and they age and they are sad and they forget the
leaping joyous and hugely far out of crest foam into the
mystical air of the ages.

 Do not age, Joel, do not let them change you or tell you
what is to be prized, for if you have let them do that, all is
lost. My prince and my castle and my kingdom are for
nothing, and when I cum into my hand, let your hand,
wherever you are, receive the surge of memory, and a soft
slit of little smile in your eyes, hiding behind the grottos of
pale blue, that a vague memory from you might so entertain,
though you never knew, though you always knew.

All thoughts of traceries and bed sittings and book reading
and long country roads that could never be long enough for
me, and always the changeling, always the nightingale in
your voice that seemed to know where the sweet cities slept
in dark and undisturbed slumber, for you were comfort fairy
tale told me when I was so young, you were the magic man
when the Twilight Zone came my way, you were the winters
of my young childhood when I stood heavily protected in my
front yard snow, and prayed to it and the cold and the night
and all the Christmas trees only in other people's windows,
and the need of something more than comic book page ink
staining my hands. The need of Joel to stain them instead
with pussy willows and crinkly corn flowers and blue bells
out in fields that were mountains we climbed to the top of.
And boy on my back and I never tiring of your riding me.

All still and Christmas tree you. All still and cleaved dolphin
smiles inbred to the species, turned into the face and turned
outward in an inability to at least show wonders of
happiness, for the golden crackle reflection frames that held
the day starved me into the night of nothing needed but the
background flowers of those frames. The pictures they held
mattering not.  It's never the pictures I look at. Not once.
I've no need of them. Not after there was you.
Commendable lots of fever and sacred loam cleave me and
cleave to me as I stood in front of your bathroom mirror one
night, before I left your house. How I took up my shirt and
pulled down my jeans and watched myself naked in the
mirror that had seen you so, countless times before, as I
rubbed myself and stroked and sighed and whispered Joel so
no one else could hear, especially not you. As I begged it to
toss some recent images of you my way.

Come to the winter of my secret, and my rushing to your
memory when you were still there with me, when weekends
were neon tubes that said JOEL all bold and proud and not
giving a good goddam what morons thinks about it, if they
can think at all, and I tripped over my tongue and held you in
my stilted eyes and my turnabout that said winning is turning
away, when the other person wants you, but no one ever
wanted me and no one was Joel, so come to me now and let
me tell you of the winter evenings after work when I hewed
myself to a nearby church when no one else was around,
when I sat on the red carpeted steps to the balcony, when I
cluttered my knives of self and need and want and memory
together and wept for you and wept because of you. Back
then, I thought God might hear me. And if he did, that he
might care. I can't even imagine how I could ever have once
thought such a thing.

My silent tears and my soft heart which was beautiful, you
should have known it then, and the long country roads that
started when I walked down the first one with you, the blue
bowl of the sky and the wind arching and wintering and
whistling you closer and closer to me the further you went
away, all skate to my heart, to my desire, to my reluctance to
turn in the road because you might find me waiting and I
can't wait any longer and I can't turn around because you
still will not be there, but if I don't, then
you--just--might--be. So I sing my sexual songs to you. I
jack off once every evening  to your high school photo you
gave me, the photo of you with that secret smile, sexuality
saturating your smoky partly closed eyes, your long gold hair
resting on your shoulders, your high shiny forehead, and I
turn to you without turning and I sing broken wheeled songs,
for the carnival troop and gizmos and devices and games of
chance and  the good old calliope machine fell off so long
ago, and the bray of the horse is now the bray of a mule that
does not want to go much further, for it is tired, and needs to
rest.

And the country road seems endless, barren and long. I need
the sea and Joel and me of then. I need to find a dolphin
dream that I can dive into with my wintry friend and see the
world from totally new perspectives, and an arm that will
extend around my shoulder and those brave blue strong
vibrant cloth eyes of yours will return to me and pierce me
and your face will come so closely to mine and you will
embrace me and my face will be against your peach fuzz and
my hands in your warm hay hair and I will not cum so lost
and so long and lonely ago, as though the age of miracles
had finally taken pity and smiled in my direction.

So walk by, children, who fervently live in today, thinking it
yours forever more; walk by and remember that age is not
your friend, that adult hood is a hollow thimble of a joke all
battered and scarred before you even get there, before you
even have a chance to be battered and scarred on your own.
And see my Joel in me, see the song of sun rising, the early
morning that will never end, the Fall I can keep safe locked
up, the joy of a voice that knows mine and does not find it
odd that my voice responds to it, but finds it important and
just and right that we communicate.

Come to the golden arms of the sun and let me place the
golden horns of crowns on your head again. Let us conjure
something besides the next day beside the next one as though
life were nothing but a series of telephone poles strung
together, side by side, without meaning or merit or substance
or difference. Let the you of then open that carefully locked
bathroom door and you will come beside me and you will
warm me with the joy sigh laugh of a boy discovering and
wishing to discover more and more, the fulfillment of
mischief that is always cats eye flash in your eyes and your
young hands that make spots of golden lion on my body and
you put my hand to the centerpiece of you and you let me
know that it is all right. That there is nothing to be ashamed
or afraid of. Not ever again.

Let me lower your already low jeans, the small smooth form
of your buttocks beginning to unveil to my touch, warm and
known and the width of your bottom unhidden, and let me
kneel in front of you and let me explore the pollen that
weaves dusky grace around the root of you, and in the
morning to feel your silken dreams spider spun all the night
time hours so we can climb our own trees  of gossamer
influx, that turn us away from the lies of tomorrow, the long
and tired and tiresome looms we will otherwise spin forever
in my lonely tower of Rapunzel, with you too, spinning them,
but only my dream boarded up in ever leavening majesty that
gets just a little more sad, a little more content with the
sadness each and every day. Kiss me Joel, and let me make
love to you, let me hold a body I never needed to touch to
know. Let me beseech you and prayerfully take the grace
that your mouth gives out. Its wisdom and its prerogatives
and its little selfish boy ties that go wailing round my heart
and tie in golden cords me to you forever more, so the boy I
dreamed and the man I became need never pendulum swing
in space again, waiting, and the wintering process fools gold
tomorrow's prize.

I loved you, Joel. I coveted you. I tried to become you. I
grew my hair long so it would be long enough to extend it of
my castle room window, to show you the winter in your own
soul even then, as you came riding along on your proud
Palomino, and I waited at stage exits and stage doors and I
tried to get the words just right and I tried to be as honest as
I could, as good, as faithful as I knew how to be, and I called
into all the eyes that came after you went away, I called
down to the depths of them, saying, let the dolphin
re-emerge, let the hunger stop, let the feasting finally begin.
Let me be beside my lad and stop the wind from Shrieking.
Stop the Lonelies.

Stop the years from clattering by, they I think more
frightened even than I, and let me gaze into the fortune teller
crystal ball of your navel, and let me feel the warm with my
cheeks and face and hands that could never be warmer
anywhere in the world that is only parched these days and
riding its memories off into the sweetness of no need for
crystal blue pure water and proud somehow in some twisted
reverie of the lack of need,  which is a lie, when it is still so
overpowering.

Let me see the dusky country road of your chest and your
nipples and your neck and your hands on my head as you
softly push me onto you and then off and then on again in the
green light red light dance to the butterflies of still active
revolution, revolving in your eye lights that tremble the
carnival out to me, that shimmer the old candles around the
gypsy wagon and the boy in scarlet who danced for the
grainers and the peasants and the people of the woods and
stoicism and the land that was made of Holland hard floor
material, out there in the dark night of trees and grass, for
come to Joel and the boy and the sea carnival, and captain
out of the Sargasso Sea.

And into the timidity of the undersea woods and me to be a
dolphin of boy beside you, my Joel, and our hands on each
other's  flowy grazing shifting, growing, sea flower penises,
balls logy and filled with grace, floating along, and our sides
together, touching silver shimmer, my dusky road country
boy, as we make love into the sea that allows us the best
magic scarves there ever are, and we cum and we luxuriate
and we need breathe only as dolphins breathe, and the sea
kings push past the luminaries of star fish and feast tridents
of all the early mornings to be into the mist of mountain
waves of bubbles that tickle and refresh and revivify, that
come to cradle, to take into its comforting caring arms--us.
And:

Joel, saying, "what took you so long? I've been by your side
all this time. You just never knew it. Boys can long too, you
know. Do you know how slow you've been? Good God!
You're the one should get a move on," in perfect dolphin
words. And we smile and are together, My Joel, come with
me to the sea, the sea, where the best, dear old friend, is yet
to be.

Mirrors reflect mirrors and each their own particular
individuality and stamp of genius and worth. And the eye of
the beholder remains in stubborn control, despite what
anyone or any mass group of anyone might wish and devise.
Which means yesterday is today and today isn't afraid of
tomorrow, so why should we be? Or anyone? With their
dream come true, or dream deferred. Does this include, even
my Joel and me? One last word. Please. Followed by one
more last word. Hurry.


With all my unwanted, unneeded, unasked for, very silly sad
clown love,
Tim