Ideas of Paradise

We all have our pews. The places we go to search ourselves. Mine just happens to be on the barstool. Sitting before the mirrored-shrine of liquor, cigarettes and jerky. The light refracting through the schnapps and vodkas and rums. I can look at myself. Into myself. Through those bottles. My image twisted and bent. Like the feelings within.
Its where I can think. About the roads I’ve taken. About Frost, and how he didn’t really take that road less traveled.
I think about how one of my roads leads to a studio apartment. A place small enough to shit, eat, and fuck without taking six steps.
Little more than a cubicle with a couch. No TV. No bed. A crooked glass door that I battle just to smoke on the porch, staring at the river one-story down.
A fridge filled with beer and catfish. A cupboard of breadcrumbs and olive oil. Fry them with enough pepper to mask the taste of the Mississippi.
Three empty bottles of shiraz on the nightstand.
A woman smoking on my sofa. Legs perched on the coffee table. Blonde, perhaps. Redhead, maybe. Though it doesn’t matter. As long as she has that meat. That padding. Enough flesh to absorb my thrusts. Enough patience and bravery.
We’d trade drinks. Share smokes. Maybe even toke while we fucked. It just might take that long….Switching positions just to get rid of the cramps. Her on top, me on top, over, under and down.
I’d cum on her belly. Watch her rub it in like some European skin treatment. Smoke again. Drink again. Let the night pass as napped and drank and listened to jazz. Unsure if we were conscious or dreaming.
We’d read the morning news and eat eggs scrambled in butter and bacon grease. A glass of cranberry juice spiked with enough vodka to take away the throbbing in my head and in my loins.
A walk down the street with two fresh smokes and no agenda. Maybe stop to watch some kids play basketball. An old woman water the flowers in her window. Two bums try to figure out where they’ve awakened.
We’d drink our way downtown. Ride the bus ’til we got lost. And just waste time. Waste life.
That’s one road.
My other road leads somewhere else…
To a small pond. Where I can sit on the shore and watch my wife, Tevis, walk towards me from our small house, enough spring in her step to make her look girlish. She’ll squeeze my arm and kiss my cheek. I’ll act as though I don’t care, but actually have wings on my heart.
I’ll read a novel with fish nibbling my toes as I sit on the dock sunning myself with the reflection from the pages, occasionally tossing canned corn to the turtles. It will be a pond that’s too big to throw a stone across, but small enough to swim. A pond that will cradle my wife in a raft as she bastes her skin. A pond skirted with cattails and trees that shadow the water in late afternoon. The frogs will croak us to sleep while the crickets play their lullaby. It will be a place where I can smoke the plants I grow on the hillside. Where the air is prehistoric with no trace of diesel.
My neighbor will be perched two hilltops away, close enough to be beckoned by a phone call but far enough to discourage any surprise visits. We could entertain the neighbors on the weekends with grilled vegetables, corn in the husk, skewered tomatoes and zucchini, all grown in my garden. Maybe drink pale ale and throw bocce balls while our children did flips into the pond. We’d laugh and tell stories embellished just enough to make them interesting.
On Sundays I would cook breakfast as the breeze billowed the kitchen curtains. My wife and I would sip coffee at our deck table, the morning sun on the pond. The children would show me crayon drawings and chase the dog, as we digested eggs and melon with our feet propped on the porch railing. I’d battle the wind as I read the newspaper.
I’d watch my wife walk the dog around the pond, admiring her sexy amble, her body bathed in sunlight. After a lunch of leftovers, I would row Tevis and the children along the banks of the pond, visiting the frogs and searching for turtles. They’d lean over the side and see the bass and bluegills dart about.
By evening we’d watch the sun go down, and then gather on the couch to watch a movie. The screen doors our only barrier to the outdoors. We’d carry the children to bed, then explore our bodies in the moonlight. Maybe atop the dock. On a boat. Even the grass. But fervently, with a passion that can only come from years of patient sexploration.
That’s the other road I imagine.
And like Frost, I wonder which one I’ll tell people I followed. And which one I actually will.