A Valentine Gush

Local Union #1999 Work in progress

I can’t write looking at this picture. Emotional flood, reverse tear tsunami, the happiest of happy, my cup overflowing, contentment juice whirling in memory’s centrifuge, the heart rained for 40 days and 40 nights… I’ll add it in later, before posting.

This is the day to think on and all marital problems must cease. No, not Valentine’s Day. I mean the wedding one, and what led up to it. Breathe in, breathe out—don’t remember… Act on the present moment. It’s here, it’s now, yesterday and tomorrow. Gimme all your money so I can do with her what the gods intended. Our wedding takes place in a few hours. It’s 2022, 1999. Everything is exactly as it should be. Now the sun rises and the flowers bloom.

Oh it wasn’t easy. I had to work for it. Really, really work for it. Lacking in looks and intellectual depth, I couldn’t rely on my beauty to win her, nor bargain on the crafty lurings of your everyday, run-of-the-mill cerebral heartthrob. I was a 19th century American romantic (aka: 21st century village idiot boob), thinking that line-cooking was my mountaintop and all worries of the world would avalanche off of me, rather, us, if she would just take my hand from fool lookout.

She experienced all the usual pre-Internet age courting rituals—Gush letters, mixed-tape music, erratic, lovesick behavior… Spy her in a car stopped at the light. Drop the croissant and run out of the bakery into the busy street to slam your body on the hood, rolling off the driver’s side, landing hard onto the pavement, bruising blue. I fell harder for her every day after that. And I didn’t stop falling until November, 2054.

---

Two songs recorded yesterday, written at the first prime of our lives, a couple decades before liver spots landed on my strumming hand. The first song is about pining for the impossible while grocery shopping:

Tops

Then a Valentine’s Day biography:

Valentine

Here is a love letter from November 1995 (Look at the envelope [from July of that year]; Just imagine how difficult it was for her to decipher the upside-down left-handed writing of its contents):

Oh love, why do you think we are together? I could say that it’s destiny but I have no faith in fate that decides. Fate died with the Model T, soon after snuff relinquished its reign to crack, and those ghost people with Starter jackets dropped their fedoras off at the Salvation Army. I think we are together out of a mutual love in the philosophy of “a life worth living,” which is wonder. Not that I have it on Plato, ha-ha, (he wouldn’t know what to do with a T.V. besides throw it). We are together because of philosophy. We both had an idea about love and its nurturing—a conviction that it was not inertia, that it was change in love, in sex, in food, in the same manner that each day is different, that days change, and change, by its own force, can not be overcome. The change I speak of is like “Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” where in her eyes, “the moonlight swims”. The change happening right before your eyes, in daydreams of both the grounded and the globe trotter. No need to move a muscle to decide what to eat for dinner. Chicken over rice or Fettuccine Alfredo? Spring into summer, summer into fall, regardless of how we make our money and do the laundry. I made love with you for the first time, and then, like April or December, craved the change of a thousand more love makings with you.

I think it is the love of life, the desire and want of it too, that has brought us together. How I longed for you at the Woolsey’s bar. Your smile and talk, eagerness, easiness, confusion, awkwardness, so downright clumsy in your obvious way, and yet the most graceful woman I have ever met. I remember how I was suddenly slapped in the face with a vision to see beyond your beauty. I would always love this face, that was apparent, but how did I already know the “you” that was a mystery to the rest of the world? The “under the skin” stuff? The gentleness, sincerity, patience, calm, the fire? I don’t know how I saw all of it. But I did.

Some unknown force, perhaps not human, aided your development. In the negative you are not of the multitude, and yet this is a purely positive truism. Gentleness, sincerity, sensitive love... I think you are a living example of what we all may become. You are mislabled “wholesome”. And you are whole. I see this in you. But you are much more, to contradict both men and women. You are true as nature. You go to the bluffs on a summer’s night. You become the bluffs, the night, the wind, grass, and distant thunder. You are this without trying, no presumption, without vanity. That is the wild in you that has been lost to so many. You see so many things that the rest of us don’t give a crack’s ass to. You are woman—the devil, the angel, the bad, the good, the is-ness and such-ness that the boy Buddhas whine about all day long. On a windy summer night at the bluffs there are exactly 63 trees, 1 mole, a colony of ants, seven flashes of lightning, a googol blades of grass, and one woman. That is your sex, your strength—the base of whoever or whatever you desire to be, right there, in the wet grass.

Now for a tale of true ambition... The life act of making someone happy. Hell, make a thousand people happy, and they call you a saint. Spend a lifetime perfecting the happiness of one, and you are a misguided fool wasting precious time. I can be stopped from work, denied cash flow, civil rights, food, water, interesting shaped rocks, O2, wind, light, furry rodents, sunshine—I can even be denied you—but love? No way. We may separate during a lifetime. If I am left only the memory of your love, then so be it. For it will sustain me. It will feed and nourish. Of this I am certain.

So there my dear. You have gone too far. Made an impression on me. A hot, deep brand. To make love to another woman would be impossible. R-O-S-E, burned an inch deep into my back. Black-charred Rose brand marked from my shoulder down to the first short hairs of my butt. What other woman could stand that? Hmm?

you, ewe, u,

Pie Dove Stew,

Ronald.

---

I Love You More Than Madness More Than Dreams Upon the Sea 2013. Acrylic on panel, 64 x 48”

---

An erotic poem:

How to Repeat Another Monday

Okay
It’s 11:00 a.m.
By noon thirty
I want one hand up your dress
and a wet mouth
with kisses dripping off your neck
and my other fingers
combing your hair back
against the cool bark of a sleeping tree
This will make life right today
before work and their cold skin stares
If I can put you in a fix
Like our mangy tomcat does
to his ladies round here
Then Miss Woody Moss
Meet your God Pan
and do everything to me,
just no stopping for spiders
or wormy things
Right?

Finally a Black Disco Dress 2018. Acrylic on canvas, 18 x 24”

Rose has coveted a black disco dress ever since she was a little girl, to which this day I have not provided. This is the metaphor of our love. I don’t think she’ll ever get one either.

But she’ll get everything else a life needs under the sun.

This song is exactly about that, written and recorded last January:

Black Disco Dress

---

Finally, I’ve shown this video before. I just can’t help it. I filmed Rose nearly every day for a year and compiled the rush with the energy of a great tune by Van Morrison.

Now I just need all the money in the world to take her where falmingos fly:

Thanks for the visit!

Ron