sandbar

I have no bravery. I have tits. I have an auditioning thing I do.

I'm tired.

What does it mean to audition for others?

I have tits but I only want to share them with women.

With women now. Or those who are functionally women. I don't mean sex.

I am like a jazz song that only exists because of the musician's lack of confidence with certain aspects of his instrument. I only want to inhabit your body in a public place, in the middle of a city, there should be alcohol and people talking. The way the lack of confidence in jazz can butterfly about a bar and bump into a lost key, the key the song forgot.

This is one way I could be with you, even though you don't believe in me.

If you understood me as an accident you had made on some foreign instrument you still like in a way. Despite your lack of ease.

Your funny failed fluency.

The idea of a place where your mistakes are welcome. Like heaven. Or to speak in more earthly terms, poetry.

"I would rather be a bar like this than any human being."

Things I say when I am being brave or stupid, or darkly both. Like when I took swimming lessons in the ocean as a child. Later, I could see the sharks through the boardwalk slats below us when the tide came in.

We thought it was funny: they were little sharks.

"They're only sand sharks," my dad would say.

I swam once with my mother and father to a sand bar.

At evening, a few hundred yards off the shore. New Jersey.

My mother and father were almost young and still beautiful.

I was a skinny child. I was fast.

I remember my mother's bright yellow swimsuit.

I remember sputtering, looking down into the ocean and even through the sunset I could see the unusual shape of the conch.

I dove and had it.

It wasn't bleached white like the ones for sale in the chichi boardwalk shops. Nothing had lived in that shell for years. I didn't know if it was thirty years old--or a hundred. It had all these tiny holes the size of Coke bubbles near the crown, so many, so many. It was a lacework of erosion and the faded color of ancient lace. Or lace in a chain smoker's house. That color.

We made it to the sandbar and were triumphant.

My mother held my shell and laughed.

It wasn't dry land. We were still submerged. But the interesting way the water swept around the sandbar. My father sat with his legs below, behind him, breast stroking with his arms.

That's where sharks feed, in that churn.

What did we know? We are a lightly evolved species. We love twilight. We love coursing things. We rarely read up on the things we are going to do. We live or die. Instead.

We like to go to places that carry a slight risk of death.

Part of the reason it's called a vacation is because there's always a sense you might vacate life altogether.

While you're having fun, of course.

We love things that suddenly appear and then disappear--it's the mainstay of magic.

A sandbar was one of many beautiful things my parents gave me.

I came long after most of the risk in their lives had passed.

But this was a small scintilla I enjoyed.

I could see the people they had been before I arrived, perhaps cramping their enjoyment at fucking with life just a little.

That they made room.

That's what I mean I guess.

I miss swimming with sharks.

Just a bit.

It's the same way with language for me.

I'm never too tired to walk down and look at the gorgeous homelessness of the ocean.