Adam Fieled (editor, Philadelphia, USA): "Live Forever"

We had it then— not just the embedded depth
of soul love, but glamour right on the ground,
as the formation formed by which Mary & I spent
all of our nights together. Our route— West
Philly to Logan Square & back— took two
disparate locales, made them whole, out of
a sense that they were meant to be wed, just
as we were; Logan Square with its sleek, modish
urbanity, West Philly with its rusticity, climbing
ivy, plus the obvious inversion of a well-worn
media cliché against it. By New Years Eve, 2003,
there was so much gaiety in the air, we’d pierced
a hole in the obdurate, obtrusive surface of human
life, to find ourselves in a tropical paradise—

I relate to it, now, as a clear demonstration that
Heaven on Earth happens. In Abby, we had a soul
sister; in the large co-op twin on Baltimore Ave.,
a safe haven; my flat in Logan Square created
a different, representatively recent kind of stage;
all were playgrounds where the dope, pills, every
thing else was shared by all, as all of our bodies
were for each other & no one else. The profound
ecstasy of that New Years was that a bunch of
artistic misfits found ways & means of being
completely at home in the world, against constraints
that needn’t have been there, with a serene sense
of what it might mean to live forever. We were
right, then & there, to be who we were, & we knew it—


©  Adam Fieled 2022