It was the sickening anticipation really. That's what gets you (gets me) every time. The moment before. The moment after it's done the tingle is gone. Your dick is on its way back to flaccid, already you can hear the scream of fire engines. Someone has called the mortician. The dawn will always come; that thin line of red that melts to gold. Which Frost tells me is nature's hardest hue to hold. Frost tells me a lot of things, all of them beautiful and I ache (bleed, even, on the inside) to believe them.

Before the dawn when I'm waiting, wondering (anticipating, really) and praying, after my own fashion. "Dear God," I say, I pray (I try, at least) "if you can't force me to believe in you at least allow me to believe in Frost's beauty. And if you are listening then isn't it just your beauty that he sees? That I would be believing in? Doesn't it, in some round about way, bring me closer to you? Do not all roads, no matter how infrequently traveled, bring the traveler towards you? Are you not the beginning and ending of all things? The meaning in every spring?"

I hear nothing for my trouble. Though I am not surprised. I am not listening. I am only anticipating the possibility of sound.

Frost tells me that winter is beautiful, too. He tells me of woods filling with snow. Of the cleaning of the world. That it is necessary for the trees to bloom again, for the earth to warm again. He marvels and he claps his hands and rubs them fiercely together. He dances with his breath before him in the early morning light. But (to me) winter hurts. The cold hurts. It grabs at my fingers (and my heart) and it turns them blue. Blue is a hue nature knows how to hold. In all of its many verities. The sky is blue and ice is blue and my eyes are blue. This cannot be a coincidence.

I tense and I chatter and I shiver and I remember what it was like. That rush of being in the moment. The anticipation complete and full. Knowing that pain was coming.

I remember a lot of things, of course, as is par for the course for me and my kin. All of our kind. I wonder if that's part of the plan. We are purified by pain, conditioned by pain, and (eventually) broken by pain. We know this. Perhaps we learned it somewhere. The same somewhere we learned that fire is golden and beautiful and will fight the winter, but will also burn. Oh yes, the fire will leave its mark. Though I suppose the same could be said about us, though the scares we leave are not quite as visible.

Though (mostly) we have learned to anticipate pain. To fear that anticipation. To tense and to chatter and to shiver hoping (praying), "Oh please, oh please, I do not want to be purified today. I do not want to become holy today." We think of Saint Augustine. "Please, dear Lord, please make me chaste. But not just yet." And deep, somewhere, we think, "not ever." Though we know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The road to heaven, I'm told, is paved with golden cobblestones.

"What damage can someone do with a suit case full of cobblestones?" It's an old joke and a parable, too. The moral being that there are no rich in heaven. That there is nothing to be greedy for. Unfortunately, though, I do not live in heaven. If only nature were that greedy; holding and hording its gold with a suspicious vengeance that I imagine the rich must feel thinking that they can't possibly have done anything worth this good fortune. But is it good fortune to be afraid and paranoid all your life? Then again, I must ask, is it good fortune to toil and hurt all your life without any gain and the shallow hope that there will be some reward after?

I wonder, sometimes, what I would be like today if I had held onto that dawn. Perhaps had my reward here, on earth. What damage I could have done with a suitcase full of cobblestones. I could have wielded it like truth and drank it like water until my eyes turned gold. But that is not the dawn that I remember. It is a strange thing, memory, as it whispers to us that we are not the people that we used to be. Never can be again. I remember the dawn that followed, the tingleless dawn (filled with pain) when I was sifting though the rubble wondering if I would ever walk again.

Frost doesn't tell me of pain. Loss, maybe, but no pain. Not the way that I know it. Frost's pain is wrapped up in beauty (all things are, to him) and awe. What the Romantics would call sublime. Though, I suppose, Frost would never take sail on a stormy sea, but Tennyson never got to usher in Camelot. Tennyson washed up on the shore, bloated and green and mostly unrecognizable, his power drained into that dark sea. I fear (know) that I will end this way. It hurts me, it grabs at my eyes (turns them blue).

Tell me the tale, if only you could. But what was that like, dear Frost? To stand on the threshold of perfection? To know (to know) that you were marshaling in a golden age. And how poetic, how prophetic, (Thesieas would be proud) to know that nothing gold can stay.

And what of Frost's pain then? Of knowing that he had seen the future. Of knowing that he had seen that Dallas day, that shock and that jolt that would end innocence forever. Why did he not cry out? Shout with his rasping lungs, "Flee from here, oh Oedipus! Get thee to a nunnery!" Away, away, there is nothing but pain here. Though, I suppose, all of the golden must end in such a way.

Perhaps he hadn't known, denied the wisdom of the oracles, the chicken bones laying plainly in front of him. Prophet by surprise, wrapped up in the bonds of fate, blown by the winds of change. Did he reach for that broach? Damn his eyes, "out, out vile jelly," and curse the beauty he saw? Where Frost's eyes blue? The must have been, surely. But he was an old man then, and too much for this world. Perhaps he had stored his treasures up in heaven, where he knew his gold would stay. Paving the streets, though it may.

I never had faith like that. I believed in my fellows and the onward, onward, onward of humanity's marching drum. I stepped in time and out of time and abstracted from the rhythm until I knew it better than I knew myself. Little did I know the machine I was creating with it's sharp edges and right angles, and nothing beautiful about it. Gold is too soft, it bends. Sometimes I think I was building Babel, and I've been told that Babel must fall. Kafka, who never said much about beauty, tells me that, "If Babel could have been built without anyone ascending it, construction would have been permitted."

But who was ever able to stay away from something they created? Walt Whitman couldn't, Poe and his dreadful tales have edition on top of edition, tumbling and rumbling back upon each other until nothing is definite; nothing is golden. I certainly couldn't. I would (I still do) make something and fix it and change it and update it over and over again. Ever so slowly turning my castle in the sand into a pile; waiting for the tide to wash it away. The same cold tide that washed Tennyson ashore. The same wintery tide pulls at my heart as I try to hold the sand (worthless now) against my chest. It is useless, though, it slips through my blue fingers like so many hopes. I tense and I chatter and I shiver and I feel the rush again.

On the other hand, "Kubla Khan" was left unfinished. If you can't do it right, leave it undone. I should have listened. I should have known. I should have a lot of things. It is hard to see a blue sky and a blue sea though blues eyes on a blue day. A golden dawn might have been just the thing to break the homogony. I should have become the ostrich, and buried my head (hands, heart) in that sand. Would have been better use than a castle anyway, no matter how high.

Sometimes I wonder if Frost built sand castles as a child. I wonder if he was ever a child. For how could he have been, with his wisdom and foresight? Are prophets ever young? Could they ever be? They must spring into this world full grown (Athena-like) brandishing their golden knowledge and blind. Always blind. Forever blind. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. How could such knowledge be bestowed on a youth? Isn't growing up hard enough to do? But that has never been the way of things. God never intended that, not even for His Son.

But isn't that what growing up is? Learning things you're too young to know. Things that hurt. Thing that are not beautiful, that Frost did not intend. You're never old enough or wise enough to be ready for the pain, however much you anticipate. However much you turn your blue stomach over and over until you vomit up everything gold inside you. The moment will still come and still overwhelm. It will still break you and shake you and remake you into its own image. And what image does pain bring to your mind? "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood." Though you would take the high road, if you could, the one paved with golden cobblestones, you cannot (I cannot). You watch it slip away as you fall.

So I fell, and it's no big secret. I have the scars to prove it. Even the ones you (I) can't see. Stuck my hand in the fire, as it were. Or more so, was lead, was taken into the fire. I followed, of course, I do not mean to imply my complete innocence. Never my complete innocence putting my hands up saying, "Lead me not into temptation." I will confess my hubris. I put my hand out, "Ask me your questions, bridge keeper. I am not afraid. Lead me forward. There is nothing in this world that I am ill prepared for." I have been wrong before and I will be wrong again.

I teetered on the brink. That was it, that was the moment. The anticipation sweeter than life itself, like drowning in sugar. Sugar is a crystal, you know that? It scratches going down. It is like swimming in Tennyson's sea, knowing that your boat is gone, that the storm rages, but all you can see is blue and you get a mouthful of sand without water. Just sand that tastes like sugar, and you know you're falling. Without the ability to push towards the surface for relief. Not knowing where the surface is, what the surface is. Not knowing how to push. Thinking, somehow, that this is all you've ever known. All you will ever know. This falling. There is nothing left but surrender.

But who surrenders? You surrender when there's no hope, because it could be the only way to see tomorrow. But what if you know you aren't going to see tomorrow? And if there is hope (even a small bit) you cannot surrender for if you do (actually) live to see tomorrow who could live with it? Knowing that maybe if I had tried harder I could have done it on my own terms. I could have walked (walked) away. Is there any beauty in giving up?

Only if I had teetered the other way. "That was close," I could have sighed. I would have thanked my lucky stars (golden, all of them) and drank deeply from Frost's poetry for the rest of my life. I could have climbed down and placed both of my feet on the ground at the same time and as time passed I could have forgotten my tingleless dawn. Never woken to the blue feeling of helplessness and just kept walking throughout.

But that was not the way that it was planned (written). I rocked once, I tensed and I chattered and I shivered, soaked with fear and dreadful (sweet) anticipation. Then the time came and I was not ready. One can never be ready for the sun to melt your wax made wings. I dropped my suitcase full of cobblestones, burned my collection of Frost poems, cursed the only way I knew how, "I'm coming down." As the ground rushed towards me all I could see was everything that had come before and all I could do was anticipate the pain of everything that would come after.