The Bogart Girl

Longing is like a rose that waits for the moon to open itself but needs the warmth of the sun to unfold its shy petals and so remains in bud until it rots in the cold fall rain and drops to the damp soil.  Waits another two seasons to push its declaration of desire out through the swelling buds of spring.  No words spoken, none needed.  Longing lives in a state of perpetual suspension.  The moment of being satiated it is no longer longing at all but something harder, something finished.

Longing itself is never finished.  Longing never abandons the impossible.  It's never done working our hopes into something smoking while we are drunk on our subconsciousness.

I walk outside of everyone else.  Like a ghost I walk between you all and you can't see me.  I brush your forehead with something like the voice of who you have abandoned to this strange place and you twitch uncomfortably; this social sphere of other disingenuous people are all so very important to themselves.  I streak past this vignette of you sitting with your legs crossed, talking like an adult with other non-adults and I know who you really are underneath your rice powder and your androgynous suit of second hand wool.  I know what you want.  I know who you kiss in your sleep and I know what you won't ever say out loud.

But you can't see me here, this ghost that I am because I am a faded nothing.

You are speaking glibly of music and life and you sound authoritative and keen.  Your friends lean in periodically and they flash in the sun like exotic iridescent birds.  They are all so pretty and colorful and somehow from a distance you can't even tell what anyone is saying because you're in your head all the time.  I'm there with you. 

There must have been a time when you were solid like flesh.  Solid with the desires of a natural person.  Sex drugs and rock-n-roll baby.  Yeah!  Yet no one can remember. 

Kisses should be something you dream of and maybe never experience because in real life tongues are wet and demanding and can never deliver, truly, what is asked of them.  I know that's what you're thinking as everyone talks.  Everyone else is asking for physical satisfaction, but you, little peep, you keep hoping that the body will deliver the spirit and it doesn't seem possible that spit has enough power to deliver anything besides mono.  Everyone you know is seeking that dive of exploration- that breathless physical release- the great heave of everything until skin is just skin and breath comes so quickly no one can catch it.

I hear you.  I hear what you are thinking.  That girl who lets herself be tied up by adolescent boys in a closet and toyed with; violated by inanimate objects so much colder than skin; you think she is weak and you are scared for her because you are scared for yourself that that's all there is to it all- a cruel consumption of body and the empty souls left all over the floor afterwords like spent bullet shells.

You are afraid that this weak girl is much stronger than you are.

You nod your head to your friends, you hear their bold escapades, their colorful embrace of what is natural and you, you-my little flint of stone, you wish for no embrace if it is going to end in devouring what little you have left of the spirit you stole back from the abuse.  If it means burning up the last of your safety. 

I hear you.  Because I am right next to you, touching your temple with my drapes of air which you mistake for little rushes of  breeze.

You covet that naturalness your friends have and yet you are outside of it, unable to open it, this gift that everyone else has- to be natural- to open- to break bud- to burst out into your corporeal self like it was a god given gift but you sit here like a strong being and pretend you don't care.  You don't care.  You build this ice-princess persona to cover up the fact that you are more like the morning frost that turns to dew at the slightest hint of light and dries up into bright morning.

With it you wear your men's suits.  You put ties on and I see what you attempt.  I see it and I know what is underneath.  You think you can hide in this androgyny because your breasts are so small anyway- that you can become a non-gender and therefore not answer to the woman you are meant to become.   Not answer the siren call of teen life.  Of burgeoning adulthood.

You are ashamed of what you really want: to be longed for.  All you really dream of is to be appreciated- loved even- but safely from a distance of at least a foot and a half  because you have never known an undemanding love.  You want the boy in the cafe to see you, to really see you- as I do- and to have the urge to protect you like you are precious and beautiful and something rare.  You want him to long for you without violence,  without that violence that bodies demand and desire.  You are afraid of it.  You smell it when it comes.  You smell it five miles away and you run like a wild beast about to be brought down by carnivorous appetites.

Your madness makes you smell their intentions from long distances with no wind.

I see the boy in the cafe on Haight Street look at you.  I see how he has undressed you from your tie as though it was a piece of gossamer wrapping.  I see how he has already assessed the contents beneath the suit you wear.  You don't realize how feminine you look in that suit.  You don't realize that even small breasts are a woman's attributes and that even the smallest ones give pleasure to most desirable men. He desires more than longs.

Suddenly you feel it and wonder if he is imagining how he can use you like a curiosity, like a body without feeling of its own- an experiment to be made with carrots or pipes, or bottles, and I see you shrink from his eyes like he's suddenly shot out a sharp forked tongue.

I want to tell you it doesn't have to be like that.  That he doesn't want to defile but to learn to know a body, a person, a spirit that climbs out of skin when defenses are down, he doesn't know it and you don't know it but it's the original womb of what everyone wants.

To be known from inside the skin out.

I know, my sweet wasting spirit, you crave something ephemeral.  Something more lucid than out of control passion, but something less than reality.  Those eyes that see you, they see a woman, not an ice castle nor a precious china vase- they see something warm blooded and gorgeous.  They see a body of work that has pheramones and scent like a maturing animal and I can't help you.  I can't make you understand how many shades of OK it is to be who you are, what you are, and to be made of flesh. 

I know you want to tear it all off.  I am like the first shed of skin.  Your personal ghost.  Your cast-off self.  Your perpetual shadow.  I walk your walk and I am your sleeper.  I kiss when you wish you were kissing.  I am unafraid but I have no body because you shook me off like old hair.

You get up now, out of your cafe seat and approach the counter to get a refill of coffee.  When you walk you walk with all the grace of a tiger cub.  You don't know your own limbs.  But underneath this veneer is the real one- fierce like a hunter, not the hunted. You break things, you forget your own space but it is the clumbsy shadow of the person waiting to come out of this current skin.  You are lithe and don't know it, you are sleek and don't see it, you are hunter but have yet to claim it.

Even now you have yet to claim it.  And why?  Why.  Why.  Because you still walk with the glitter of early evening.  You still dream the bodiless dream.  The dream of longing.  Without body, without form, you dream of longing without sin, without consequence, like sweet maidens offering milky throats to men with honor who will touch gently but not ravish, who will remember in torturous reenactment this turn of skin so gorgeous it might kill them should they breath anything as strong as violent desire.  The dream of inspiring protection, not the protection of fathers but the protection of lovers who will wait a millenium to touch, to take, to become.

What man is that?  The man who will love forever what he cannot physically possess?  What man who is not dead would fix his light on such chances? 

There is no such man.  Man needs touch.  He needs to reach a soul with his hands, with his skin, with his crystaline glaze fascened to your supple limbs.  He needs to posses in order to find the desire to protect.  Oh honey, one must pay for protection first with whatever coin one possesses.  The man in the armour wants the same coin the man in the snakeskin suit wants.

Broken girls should sleep a longer sleep.  You, my girl, should chase your body down.  You should find your limbs and then release them for the love of love.  Man sees you.  He sees what you don't see yourself. He would cherish if you would not hoard.  He would protect if you would give.

You see your friends unfettered, you see them freely give and explore and redeem.  And you feel alone because you would do the same if you didn't feel a thousand fires flare up between you and those eyes you steal glances at between sips of too-sweet coffee.  They look back at you fearlessly and shut you down.  You in your suit of second hand wool; with your men's shoes and your cigarrette hanging from your lips like you live off of water and smoke.  Talking out the side of your mouth like Bogart, you even think you might be Bogart.  You imagine yourself sharp in double breasted worsted, you think you will become man if you shine your shoes and swagger past bodies without seeing.  Without caring.

Oh my sweet infidel- you're no less than Dietrich in a suit.  You wear your double breasted like a woman.  You watch and listen like a woman.  Though you may only be seventeen, you already smell like a woman and your curves betray you in those straight wool lines.  As though you were naked on the judgement day.

Every day is judgement day.

I wish you would look back.  I wish you knew you were shedding ghosts in your wake.  What life you leaked behind you standing in the isles of the bookstore reading passages of E.E. Cummings- it was like pools of spirit washing outwards in ever increasing waves of light touching the unwary, the needy.

I think your Bogart act is effective in ways you didn't realize.  I think you are a woman of honor and men have never known what to do with that.  A woman knight.

Fast forward twenty seven years to the moment you held a foil in your hand for the first time.  The way it felt to aknowledge an apponent- to salute before each bout- like taking a formal oath.  The way your muscles fought and then gave in.  You would never be a champion but you had your own grace and I saw it.  Woman knight!

No wonder men feared.  No wonder they didn't know how to behave.  Woman warrior.  And you: a peace loving person.  With sword in hand you gave your best and felt like yourself for the first time in a long time.

I tried to tell you what kind of woman you were. Curvy, but with modest bust, perfect for defending your own honor, but no less the heroine for being breasted.

I am still here, little flint, leaving messages in your dreams.  Leaving dust on your forehead to find in the morning.  How else will you believe me?

You are the Bogart of women.