lamb of love

I took the name E.M. Lamb as a bit of an ironic statement. The full name is Ero Marc Lamb. It is meant to stand for "Lamb of Love", which I most decidedly not.

I am almost entirely devoid of feelings of romantic love and yearning . For most of my life I was a lamb of love and lead to slaughter over and over. I had so many unrequited loves I cannot count them all. Unlike most people I know I have not had a single significant romantic relationship. I have only twice dated long enough to even hold hands in public.

When I once, years ago, lamented the trajectory of my romantic life to a friend he told me something was deeply wrong with me. This was coming from a man who I had seen through more then one tragic relationship and who had also pursued me romantically to no avail. I was deeply offended by his comment not just for me but for others whose love lives were not so storied and deep as they had wished or as society expected of them.

I am not absolving myself of some part in creating the virtual siberia of my love life. I have had no game all these years. I have faltered when there were chances at something grand in all aspects of my life artistic. professional and romantic. I think I have been most successful at being a good friend. Do they write books about that or erect statues to good friends?

How do you measure the worth of a life? What is success? Desire plays an enormous part in our everyday existence and how we perceive our own lives. You must be desired to be considered a success. You must be desired in one or all aspects of your life. Desire is what drives people to the the plastic surgeon and pilates class, the desire for the perfect body, health, "the best life", the desire to be desired. The pain of not being desired drives people to eat themselves sick to satiate that the loneliness and fulfill sensate and sensuous desires. The desire to feel elated and to assuage the pain of life's stresses and failures drives people to drink and get high.

I am not a lamb of love anymore. I am not a lamb at all. Its fine really, there is peace here without yearning. At least for now.

Bones of the Earth

this is a sketch of and idea of a treatment for ... well inspiration for my memoir "Bones of the Earth". A memoir you ask? Why the fuck not I say. Its just a sketch.. but its all true....so far.

Ever since strangers opened me up one night, carving a flower on my forehead with blunt objects and pavement, slashing a window on one side of my face to expose a diorama of muscle and glands, ever since bones and blood were cracked in my face with the celebratory bravado of an ancient hunt I have had no grasp on a linear life. I am lost in the turmoil of a mind that has been beset by distraction from my earliest memories only to be exacerbated by the bludgeon of unknown knives, fists and the butt of a gun on more then one occasion. So much inspiration has sunk to the bottom of this sea of confusion. I cant finish a book, the paragraphs melt away in the click click click of other things that tear my eyes from the pages to a great sea of unopened letters and unrealized dreams, aspirations and desires. I turn to the flesh of dispassionate strangers for brutality in bed and forgetting.

I sometimes wonder if I did seek them out in some way, those boys who cut me open. I was hunted as a child by a teenage boy. He promised to kill me and he chased me through a lonely suburban backyard to an empty wooded ravine where he would brandish a knife and order me to come to him. Will I forever be looking for someone who wants me badly enough to kill me for it? Did I wonder the streets drunk that cool October night releasing the scent of the hunted? Did I set the hunt in motion in search of a murderous desire I had experienced, been the subject of, as a small boy in a small patch of woods, behind Anika's parent's vegetable garden?...

Gone Deaf

There is an empty space here

Between the pages and my fingers

Gone deaf

Gone silent

Gone bone dry

Pressing my eyelids for memory

I enumerate our mistakes

With less than agile reflexes

this fractured history is told in supple scars

They lay on the wall like brail

And we read them together

Two fools volunteering for blindness

Playing for single notes

And our feet like tambourines

On side streets in gutter puddles

Clapping in time and out.

Singing into this empty bowl

We listen for

its hollow

ceramic howl

like a song playing on obsolete vinyl

Scratching,

whining

and warm