Flatness vs How Deep?

I was flatness as a kid, with the pals playing half ball (so it wouldn't go so far). About ten years ago I saw Billy Brennan, who was older than the rest of us and organized the ball games, at the Home Depot out near the Blue Route. He looked embarrassed to be working there but remembered me. I remember breaking a window with that wobbley rubber thing, the house next door. Give me 15 mns, we could drive over there and I'll point it out to you.

Then flatly I am hearing my friend from the corner house, Vernon Johnson, tell me that he's different because his skin is black, to which I felt stumped and speechless. I think he showed me his hand, or something like that? No, I don't really remember looking at anything but his face. Maybe I'm only imaging looking at his hand. The funny thing about faces in memory is that they are ageless and his face looked to me to be middle aged. Around 35. Old age is another face then, isn't it, a mask that goes over top of the ageless face? A mask that is like camoflage to the younger peeps. Don't you turn into a ghost, basically, if that ageless face--the one that youths see in each other--if the ageless face is like an angel? Faces = angels and ghosts.

I realized a couple years ago that Vernon must have got "the talk" that day cuz kids don't normally relay info from an earlier day, not when they are about 6 years old. But then again, kids normally are pretty uncensored, they don't care about talking. Say whatever. Whenever. The beginnings of philosophy, if not squashed by adult faces.

Then even more flatly, 16 year old me is up on a tree limb 30 feet or so above a pond and me and Paul Schneider chicken out from jumping. I think I was in front of him on the limb. How deep is that water after all, hard to tell from up there. We lost track of each other after that.

There are no essays for flatness, no poems, no logic, no words. The textures change slightly, allowing for love, I suppose. History and time fall away. Memories... Mother forgot, Father leads the way across a desert. At 90, he's doing pretty well though he lost his pot belly in the last couple years and I gained it. I've started eating more meat and he stopped eating much at all. I need bigger pants, it's a size/personality crisis. Size vs flatness. Laughing Schumann mutters in the morning behind his piano. But John Coltrane isn't laughing. Not yet anyways.

And so I enter the cave of love, heading towards grounding as flatness envelopes both color and size, freedom only plays with texture when the stranger feels welcome. And please don't actually say "welcome", in order to make that happen. I didn't know until recently that anyone could really want me and that politics hardly matters. I feel sadness occasionally. "Love before Politics" is the new motto.