Letter to Myself at Age 13
or The Land of Positive Scenarios

I wonder who you would have been
if those thousand best-laid plans of circumstance
had not conspired against you.
If your mom had bought
the healthy nutritious brand for you;
had poured the right nourishment into your ears.
If you hadn't slowly shut down
every switch in your power box.
If you'd had an antidote for all those poison darts.

If we could pluck you from that pivotal point
when your soul put on it's hat and coat
and left it's key at the desk,
and convinced it to hang out a while longer--
give it some free drinks at the bar,
then we could get you a transfer and relocate you,
body and spirit, to the land of positive scenarios.

I think we would see someone very different over there.
You'd have a lean but firmly-toned body
and a blossoming awareness
of the magickal chemical beckoning
that it whispers knowingly to the opposite sex.

You'd probably be a poetic dreamer,
seeing beauty and majesty everywhere,
and you would be safe,
because in the land of positive scenarios,
there is a place for poets
amongst the stomping football feet.

You might display a touch of androgyny,
but that would be alright too.
Over there, you're allowed to revel
in every nuance of your awakening sexuality.
You can almost taste the deliciousness
of every exquisite variation of sexual energy.

The world is alive!
Every second of life is charged
with immensity and emotional grandeur,
and you can feel it with your entire body.
You're a mystic and a true romantic,
and over there, it's safe for you to melt
and join the river and the trees.
It's safe to feel sublime longing and desire
to touch a woman's soul,
to feel that nothing else in life matters
except to see into that woman's heart
for just one second.

Your eye sees the grace and beauty in all of God's forms:
male, female, young, old, animal, vegetable, mineral,
and it's all so thrilling and satisfying
that you really don't need anything else.

So take your pencil, David,
and draw and draw and draw,
and then scatter the pages to the wind.
Let them travel the globe,
landing in the hands of those who need them the most.
This is your joyous gift of gratitude
to the world that sustains you
and delights you with it's beauty.

David Aronson
April 2007