when I was a kid
I would swim to the bottom of the swimming pool
and attempt to clutch the sandpaper bottom
so as not to float back up —
“hold your breath in like houdini” —
and I could do it
if I were under the diving boards
at the 90˚ angle
where my dick could push against the cool water spout
and even then, it was great and lusty, a little bit of jouissance for a squirt like me
— excuse the pun —
and then
at the last second,
with a burst of superman
energy
I would kick off
and feel the rush of virginia woolf,
the expectation to break the waves,
a kind of insane desperation —
and it was kinda fun
in those days,
to play that game
in its different variations
and I feel that way now,
hiding at the bottom of the swimming pool —
and it doesn’t help that I’m reading ballard’s novel about boy in a detention camp —
pushing off with my planter wart soles
thumping my chest against the harsh water molecules
desperately —
and I don’t use that word lightly —
to get air
and it isn’t like when I was a kid playing
frivolous games in the lukewarm pot of summer vacation
and I know why I feel this way
that I cannot get air
because a word that comes to me repeatedly
— and you have noted it in your scrapbook —
is “bereft”
a past participle of bereave
and I cannot stand to lose you
that is it exactly
so I feel bereft
and that kind of feeling is too much like swimming up for air,
isn’t it? —
I mean, the time it takes, to kick up from the bottom,
to the moment a mouth kisses air —
is a wide expanse of time and space
and I am afraid of being alone, but pushing you away is all I know how to do
