i went out to visit a nevernever land i know of off of queens boulevard. i have been on that street a few times, and it always evokes memories of “a wrinkle in time”, and of a street where every house is the same and the community is (as i recall the story) something of an idyllic communist paradise. i may be misremembering that part of the book, or filling in details as they suit my needs, but i remembered that passage from that book there when i discovered that side street in queens, and also in Elfers, Florida, whilst driving around that immaculately-manicured retirement community in my Dodge Dart with high school friends.

i never made it to that street today, that queens street, but i did rediscover one of the 2 streets in this town that genuinely scares me. there is something eerie about the street, its number name i can not remember now, but it is an alley. i was ushered along this street one tumultuous night in a lincoln town car, driven by a mute and malcontented livery driver on christmas night, 2008. i did not know where we were going, but i was more concerned about not knowing what route we were to take. as at the piano recital the other night, my breathing went crazy. my throat tightened and my little brain felt like it might snap.

i am tired and sore today from sex last night, and when i found that dreaded side street i remembered with a laugh the central line of poetry from a screenplay i imagined writing in high school. it would be a play about the tortures of war and human degredation. the immortal line from this screenplay was to be: “Our loins are sore from fucking,” followed next in portent and sullen resignation by the next immortal line: “Our urine keeps us warm.”

neither of these lines makes any sense. well, the urine warmth line could possibly make sense if the soldiers on the front line were freezing enough that they would urinate on each other to help stay warm. but “our loins are sore from fucking” makes no sense at all, unless the front-line soldiers are buttfucking in the trenches, and even in that case it would be the anuses, not the loins, sore from the ribald pastime of war-time anal sex.

but those lines surface in my mind from time to time. the former line surfaced for obvious reasons, but the latter line only washes up in my mind on account of its association with the earlier croak of poetry. so i am wandering around some desolate part of queens thinking “Our loins are sore from fucking,” followed moments later by “Our urine keeps us warm,” both lines spoken by a deep, resigned British basso voice.

o, gawky youth.