Intimate: The Real Bastard Blues

My heart was racing and I collapsed.  I was laying there on the bed..... short of breath.... feeling self-conscious.  Hurt.  Fat.....  with self-pity. 

She stood and stepped into the restroom.  I saw her curved silhouette in the doorway before the door was closed.  It didn't belong to me anymore.  Her silhouette.  She was here...  with me.  But it felt like she was gone.  Left now.  Through the bathroom window and out into the world.....  with someone else.        

I was trying to forgive her again.  This is how it goes.  It's continuous.  I was trying to say one F word.  And I was trying hard not to say the other.  This is what you're left with once it's broken in the heart.  

My bed felt dirty.  Unclean.  

It's near Christmas time, and Christmas had always mattered to me.  The magic as a kid.  The story.  But now it was different.  I was lying there remembering the profanity of the story now.  Namely, that he was going to be a bastard.  That's what life was dealing him.  He was gonna be a bastard like me...  

(literally...  I was  Adopted.  But first born to a young girl- unmarried.  That was at the end of a time when the world still disdained people like me).       

I always loved him for that.  I don't mean worshiped in the high Holy sense... (although I've done that).  I mean loved.  With fondness.  Affection.  A kinship.  Like maybe when I looked out into the chaos of what life can be sometimes, that I wasn't alone.  Because he was gonna be a bastard like me.  We were both bastard sons together.      

But there were differences.  The world was a blues-song maker.  To that there was no doubt.  And as I imagined the little bastard boy in the manger, I was fully aware of the differences between the two of us.  I was the real Bastard.  Some of the blues of the world was a result of my own choosing.  Songs written from sins of a time I had demanded it all my way.  Refusing to play well with others and making Senatorial like decisions... Judgements....  about things and people I didn't understand.

Songs about living every day roaming the world profane, like an angry blues man...  A guitar playing Cain.  Angry.  And Hurt.  Fighting mad and consuming everything and anything like an industrialized unholy Hell.    

And now?........ Wallowing in it.  Content to just lay there like a pig.  Pitiful, on the temple grounds of the dirty bed that was my world.           

She came out from the bathroom and lay beside me.  Her skin still felt warm.  You know I love you she said.....  I didn't look at her.  

But do YOU love me?  I asked in silence.  

I wasn't talking to her.  It was the child I was talking to.  The would-be bastard son in the manger.  The lover of those who are profane.  

Do you love me I asked, and then I just lay there naked beside her.  The two of us.  Adam and Eve, profane; the both of us, on our dirty bed.  And I let my heart break itself wide open again in tears before I slept and dreamt.  And longed for a world I remembered that was once so much better than this.  Can there ever be a world that's better than this?