I consider those four months and ten day between the two poems, four months Apollinaire spent in the trenches, deep in intense erotic reveries, that brought him to that shift in perspective, to that revelation: The ass hole is the miraculous focal point for all the nuclear energy of nakedness. The vulva portal is important, of course (of course, who would deny that?), but to officially important, a registered site, classified, documented, explicated, examined, experimented on, watched, sung, celebrated. Vulva: Noisy crossroads where all of chattering humankind meets, a tunnel the generations file through. Only the gullible believe in the intimacy of that site, the most public site of all. The only site that is truly intimate, whose taboo even pornographic films respect, is the hole of the ass, the supreme portal; supreme because it is the most mysterious, the most secret.

-Milan Kundera; Slowness

The Czech scientist is taken aback: What has happened to the respect his colleagues were showing him only ten minutes earlier? How is it possible that they are laughing, that they are permistting themselves to laugh? Can people move so easily from veneration to contemp? (Oh yes, dear fellow, oh yes.) Is goodwill so fragile, so precarious a thing, then? (Of course, dear fellow, of course.)

-Milan Kundera; Slowness

I mean, seriously. My job sucks, I don't have insurance, I have very little hope for the future. I can't pay my under-water mortgage, I have no savings for my children's education, my feet hurt. But tonight I'm going to get together with a few friends, equally desperate, and I'm going to have a few beers,I'm going to kick off my shoes, and I'm going to cheer a little too loud for my giant men in spandex to defeat your giant men in spandex. And, win or lose, I'll get up tomorrow morning, a little hung-over, and I'll go back to my low-wage dead-end job. But at least I had three hours last night where the stakes were clear, heroes and villains obvious, and at the end of the day something definitive happened. I'll take that over pretty words and platitudes and empty promised one day of the week. And that day is Monday night.

PROTIP: No ipods. Fuck your face, people. I want a CD. I don't want your track rolling into whatever Beiber-tastic mix you've got for your morning workout. Not to mention ipods are about as good at standing by as cats or three-year-olds. I'm going to end up playing the Aardvark Trio or Aerosmith. While, yes, it's your ass on stage looking like a fool, it's my ass not getting a call the next time because the wrong sound is coming out of the speakers. And, as much as I love getting fired because you can't prep for your show, I want to be honest with you, because I feel like you and me and your ipod have reached a place of Stockholm syndrome due to the stress, and that is, honestly, I don't.

Soft as a baby's bottom, as my first taste of spring.

I asked the Lord, "Lord why is it that on my most difficult days there was one set of footprints?"

And the Lord said, "Because, my son, sand people always walk single file to hide their numbers."

Sometimes I think I would prefer a letter in a bottle. Scribble down my words, "I love you, I miss you, write soon!" Cork the thing, close your eyes, toss with all your might. Then hope. And when nothing comes back, who knows? The tides! The cork! Maybe they never got it. Maybe they did, and wrote back, and your bottle (with their scrawl) never came in. There's no way to know.

Here I stand
Naked and famous

Coming home I realize that most of me is on the road. That I am more comfortable with key cards and showers I use once than I am with the crushing weight of words like "home." While it is nice that there is a place that I come back to, I am aware that place is just a port in the storm. Perhaps the prefered port but still, when the winds subside I'll be back on the ocean. And that the personal part that I take with, which is the part I want to bring back, is the part that I have misplaced today.

There's a boy. Let's say he's ten years old. He goes out into a field on a summer day. He lays on his back and watches the clouds. He spends his afternoon doing this. He goes home. He decides that he wants to make art about those clouds. Gets out a piece of paper. He gets out his crayons. He draws the clouds. When he is finished he is not satisfied with them. They are kind of ugly and crude. They don't convey the meaning. The essence of what he was hoping to get at. He decides to become a painter. He goes to art school. He studies from the masters. He travels the world. He, himself, becomes a master painter. He has commissions for buildings and art houses. In his forty-ith year he goes into his studio. He paints a painting of clouds. They are beautiful and well rendered. They don't convey the meaning. The essence of what he was hoping to get at. He is a forty year old master painter. He has forgotten what it was to be a ten year old boy laying in a field looking at the clouds.

Now I would say that it was a live moment that this ten year old boy had. Laying in that field, extremely interested in his own life and the idea of life around him. And I would claim that it was a naked moment, without restraint or concern for criticism or praise that prompted him to go home and draw those clouds. But he could not make the art. And by the time he had gained the skill he was all dressed up in his artisan-ship that he forgot how to be naked. So this is where I get the subtitle: Live Nude Art. We've got a low-stakes drunken audience. Let's remember what it's like to watch the clouds.

I know that my dreams are made of water colors and little colored rolls of electrical tape. And, I would think by now, some excel spreadsheets about budgeting or scheduling. Maybe some tracking documents. And, yes, even sugarplums, so long as they're dancing. But my waking life I cannot say so clearly. I think moments of beauty that can hit you like the cold wind on a clear winters day, taking your breath away and making you stand stock still in awe. Perhaps deep kisses full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. A bit of wafting NPR floating above the rubble. Loss. Like an old man, talking about the glory days, all of which imagined.