Such Innocent Madness

Such Innocent Madness Listening to KHJ with the Real Don Steele, playing it straight and loud on Boss Radio, with an Elusive Butterfly wafting about, inside the tan ’68 Caprice, when his secret journey of a thousand eye blinks, commenced painstakingly and torturously, like a dead glacier on fire. To the left there, by her brown-skinned sternum, with her young heartbone cleaving through snail-paced determinations, he found her tender button throbbing, beneath the cotton cover and the bleach, there, in the excruciating darkness of teenage intensities; You and he were reaching for the soul of an hour, not stopping until constant time achieved the impossible stare off, between them and it, between the air, and the touching; between the voicing of electronic controllings, and the perennial reaching for another red apple, served au jus, with croutons, earwax and studied leanings. Now, it is just another pause in the exertions of young existence, another heaving mindmelt in the suburban fog, where you and him once sat fifty years ago, at the big oaken table beyond the archway there, inside his mother’s old musty house on Hoover street, amidst the closed bedroom doors, the bougainvillea, and the tacky green carpet with a dozen dog stains. You sat there alluringly and decidedly silent, with your long smooth legs opening and closing, like a panting mouth, sucking in cigarette smoke in the dry wind. But it was such innocent madness, what was done and said that distant night in 1969, with you and him sitting decidedly close in the darkness, within the secure, locked confines of the tan ’68 Caprice. Listen. Can you hear his bellowing voice through the speaker? The Real Don Steele said it was April, when all elusive butterflies swarm to the beat of the night, the elusive time for young lovers to learn, and sigh. . .