Foolish Love
Foolish Love (Single Version)
written, performed, edited, and produced by Michael John Ciszewski
with special thanks to Brian Dudley
featuring a performance of "Foolish Love" by Rufus Wainwright on 'Later... with Jools Holland' (1998), used under the guidelines of the Fair Use Copyright Act. Disclaimer: Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.
“Foolish Love”
I keep dreaming about a man with long hair—(oh God maybe it’s me… I didn’t want it to get this long…)
The man in my dreams, I think I’m in love with him and his hair. And his smile, the gentle ridges it cuts into his face, fresh and worn and weathered. That kind of face, a kind face. Bewhiskered, just a little bit. A little sleepy and soft and delicate. But, you know, cut that gentleness with the edge of your standard sword of masculinity, make him rough and ready to meet that standard that has been pulverized into my tender subconscious by years and years of conditioning towards the heteronormative… father. Papa. Daddy.
Bleuch. Puke. Gross. No.
He is my long haired angel who visits me with his hair and his perfect face of craggy down pillows, floating down to me from heaven on high to hold my face in his hands, to balance me and my mixed up energies.
Eyelashes like a fucking gazelle, gatekeeping his Hollywood eyes, starry, star-lit and I’m his star.
Each of his exhalations perfume. I’ve never smelled anything sweeter. Pheromones are an absolutely crazy thing. Human chemistry, the science of love. This is how I work in this weird and sad elastic sack of a body I dress up to balance comfort and contagiousness, I want to be caught red handed and ready to paint in rosy hues of blush and bliss—him.
Him! He turns me on, how dare he, and before I know it he’s gone. He wouldn’t even wait for the dream to end, he wouldn’t even wait for me to wake up, men can be so selfish. Mankind is so selfish, it makes me sick to my sour stomach.
Bleuch. Awful! Awful.
I don’t even know his name. I realize. I don’t even know the angel’s name, and I know all angels have names, and I don’t know his. He didn’t say. Or did he? What was his name?
Is it Aaron?
Is it Patrick?
Is it Greg, or Tate?
I’m just guessing. I’m guessing. I’m throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if it’ll stick and you’re yelling at me to stop throwing spaghetti at the wall because it’s fucking gross and you don’t want to have to clean up spaghetti from the wall. I’ll stop.
Does it matter? What his name was? When he leaves me with only a bitter taste in my mouth, left from that toxic, noxious pheromone perfume?
Why has he gone? Will he return to me? He will. I know he will. He must. I’ll dream again. I always do, it’s an affliction an unfortunate symptom of my incurable romantic condition, me having my head stuck in the clouds—same as up my own ass, really—but when? will he come back to me?
And will he touch me again? Will he hold me and make me feel right? Will he screw me and make me scream out his name—finally! So that I’ll have caught him by knowing him and seeing him and making him stay. He’ll try to go, as he always does, long before I’m ready to wake up and I’ll turn over and pull my white sheet up over my bosom and shout:
STOP, GREG!
No, please not Greg. There is no good name for a man. There are no good men. Um…
STOP, ALEXANDER.
Something Greek about that, heritage.
STOP, ALEXANDER!
I’ll throw my hand out like a crossing guard or the Spice Girls in the music video for “Stop” and I’ll say
STOP, ALEXANDER!!!
And he’ll stop. He’ll turn around on his wingéd heels and he’ll cast his Hollywood eyes at me, his star, and his long eyelashes will suddenly grow by meters, pouring forth from his eyelids, to wrap me up in them, that’s how seriously he’ll see me, at long last.
And then we’ll get married. A civil ceremony and small reception, family only. Two or three hundred, probably. Dancing, live band and DJ. Bohemian aerial circus performers. Champagne and desserts only. And shortly thereafter, babies! We’ll have babies and move out of the city.
And I will complain for all of eternity. I will bemoan this for all of eternity, this life sentence with my angel Alexander, stuck in the suburbs with our babies born of half-angel, half-boy blood. I’ll say I didn’t want this! with hands like daggers wet with nail polish. I didn’t want this! I didn’t want to love you like I did, like I do—because I still do!
I’ll be trapped in this love, helpless and lost in love with my angel Alexander and the life we sweat to build together, in the wilds of the American suburbs, with our beautiful children who will inevitably cure the world of all hatred and disease.
I’ll spend my later days sighing and tanning. I’ll lay out in our front yard with one of those tri-fold aluminum sun reflectors from all the movies I pretend to worship and sear myself away, evaporating, melting into sweat and sun shine in the endless summer swelter of true, blue love.
Maybe then, I’ll finally be perfect enough to become an angel myself.