HOWLIN' BY FELIPE LUCIANO

HOWLIN’



I’m calling out now.

But, it’s a different howl,

Not so much desperation.

The need is more a Coltrane ballad,

A need to talk or touch

And talk and play bed-games.

Strangers need to unveil so many masks

And hold so much in.

Secrets are like love juice to me.

Like sweet figs I can savor and chew,

And when sex secrets come out in a raspy moan,

When the love that arches its back and confesses

To wanting everything you’ve whispered,

I see magic.

I see rainbows.

I’ve never been turned on by silence and candlelight dinners,

Remorse and layers of erotic make-up.

It may sound impulsive.

It may sound dangerous,

But, I need to gush in my lover’s arms and say it all.

And the greatest sin is to hold back,

To allow the volcanic thrust of fire to go unanswered.

If you come here, to my bed,

You trusted something.

Unless you wanted to see how far you could play this game

And who you could tell.

Do you laugh when you speak of my weakness?

Or do you flat out tell all/in run-on paragraphs, matter of factly,

As if I were just another man.

It doesn’t matter, you see……because….

I don’t care what you claim.

What you say or how….

I know how you cried, how you clutched,

How you trembled and touched my temples.

And though your friends smirk,

I never see you give me one honest look when you’re with them.



I remember a girl once in college.

I felt so deeply.

Sucked the secrets out of her fearful past.

She knew who I was and who I had been with

And understood the need for me to gallop and conquer.

I heard it all and kept it secret.

My mistake was hurting her in the presence

Of a male she wanted to admire and control.

Instead of making me pay the price of having busted the bubble

Of faith, she left in righteous anger and took him to her breast,

Quickly.

And she lost again, got bitten badly

By a male more in love with me than she.

Still carries the scar of a first love gone rancid.

(And while I thumb through the Book of Malachi,

I learn of my treachery towards the wife of my youth.)

There are times I’d like to marry her again.

Bring all those decades of pain and stumbling

And thick fog to a halt.

I wish I could

stop the boring, infernal, sickening circle of old wounds

Whose scabs I pick to see the flesh and feel the fire.

I know the change will come when someone bellows in tears “Enough”.



I’m calling out now.

And it’s a different howl.

I want to remedy and cement.

I want my family of friends again.

And I want to love my mother

From a position of love and marriage.

Not solitude and dysfunction.

There are no bridges to my children.

Or for them.

I’ve left them as they left me,

Alone,

To fend off the world, to define it themselves

With no oracle of substance that offers

At least a wholesome, natural something to rebel against.

So, they too will seek approval the wrong ways.

Until the night of their fears hits them

And they drop Daddy’s fears and tattered baggage,

And realize they’re perfect just the way they are.

I’m calling out now.

‘Cause I want to. Cause I need to.

--Felipe Luciano
December, 1995