If you’re sixteen and you’ve never been laid or kissed or touched with an erotic charge and you’re lonely and you read a lot of books and your parents have a lot of books smoldering smokelessly on sagging shelves, books from the long 20th century that they inherited from their communist parents who ran a hotel for struggling artists in the Catskills, and you spend hours and afternoons and a decade smelling and looking at and even running your tongue along these books, tasting the booklice and the mildew, whispering the names of the authors aloud as if that would allow you to ingest their genius, their magic, an incantation, licking Studs Terkel, nibbling the edges of Jean Rhys, sniffing Jon Dos Passos, rubbing your thumb along Edna St. Vincent Millay’s spine, then surely you’re forgiven if you rip off Robert Desnos in your long, meandering, self-pitying love letters to a girl in your grade you don’t know but whose name is Lyla, Ly-la, a two-syllable song, and who has a big bundle of dark curly hair that you stare at, pine for, each time it appears like an Herbal Essences-scented tumbleweed—those orgasmic shower commercials don’t help—blowing through the emotional wasteland that is the halls of J Edgar Hoover High.
If I could be the wind, Lyla, you write, because all poets know that weather is romantic, which lifts you across…
O scales of feeling, Desnos wrote, his emotions hanging in the balance.
And if this were the 60s—and here you’re borrowing from Radiohead—we could steal an old school bus, Lyla, and roar across the continent running on high-octane adolescent rebellion until we found Kesey or Dylan and took acid and fucked on the bus’s rusty roof and pieces of yellow paint and rust would flake off and stick to our skin, our knees and backs and asses, so we’d become part of the bus and it a part of us and the times they are a-changin’ and together on this journey…
I have dreamed of you so much, Desnos wrote, walked and talked so much with your phantom presence.
And if this were the 70s, we could move to St. Mark’s and listen to the New York Dolls, no, not just listen, Lyla, but join the band, why not? and strut strut strut the dirty Scorsese New York streets in stilettos smoking Pall Malls…
Perhaps the only thing left for me, Desnos wrote, is to become a phantom among phantoms.
And we could spend the 80s mourning the death of Ian Curtis because you like Joy Division, Lyla, I saw your shirt, and we’d dance through our grief and you could cut your hair short like Molly Ringwald and I’d steal John Cusack’s long coat and we’d get each other off in dark corners of Berlin clubs…
A shadow a hundred times more shadowy, Desnos wrote, than the shadow that crosses the sundial of your life.
And in the 90s, Lyla, we’d listen to Pavement and try to cheer up David Berman but we’d also say fuck it, proudly, with Gen X disdain, with Gen X cool, with Garofalo’s dryness, fuck it to Clinton, fuck it to O.J., to the ozone layer, to the Real World, fuck it fuck it fuck it—
O equilibrium of the emotional scales, Desnos wrote in another translation, stasis forever out of reach.
But this isn’t any of those ifs. It’s 2001 and Lyla is Lyla, you’re 16, a pimply shadow, a gangly phantom, and the towers are falling and if you send these letters you’re asking for ostracism, bullying, sneers, scrotum flicks, hair full of gum, SoBe Dragon poured down your back, dog turd bags aflame on your doorstep, you’re putting your little misguided heart on a platter and the world is all teeth and knives and appetite so don’t be an idiot.
But, alas, alack, your massive, yearning, ravenous lack: a stamp is only 34 cents and your pen is on fire and your heart is already bleeding not for Lyla but for the ledge she represents and the world you imagine blooming and ripe just beyond and you’re starving and the shelves are full of books and you whisper into them like a diner saying grace before a full plate, your tongue just touching their fabric covers, Bless us, O Desnos, and you take a bite out of this bounty, mistaking doom for deliverance, chewing paper and ink and letters and words as you leap, you scripturient idiot, straight off the ledge.
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Jon Doughboy works for the State Department as a Foreign Service Officer in little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea. This is his 118th publication. See the previous 117 @doughboywrites
New Critique 