23B - Saint Terrell

Saint Terrell‌

I met Chialeah on the beach in Hilo when she was tripping on LSD. She thought I was a saint and so I told her I was Saint Terrell. She called me Saint Terrell for a decade. We were together off and on during the 1970s, spending our first time together in 1971 in Hawaii, 1973 in New Orleans and 1974 in San Francisco. We did not physically get together in between those active moments together but we wrote each other from different places in the world until about early 1980 when we lost track of one another.

I was staying at a camping ground
a few moments out of Hilo
when first I saw her running toward me
Then in kisses and embraces she
enveloped me
She had some white slip thing on that girls
in the ' 60s wore
and of course
bells, beads and scent of sandalwood and patchouli oil.
Then she kissed my feet and said she had waited
all her life for me.
I couldn' t wait another moment to have her
and did in a cloud of frankincense and myrrh.
She said I was surrounded in white light
as she lit up some Maui-Waui
and took more psilocybin
She even dubbed me Saint Terrell
and for decades later she addressed me
that way...
Now the world seems so different from those magical days in Hawaii 25 years
ago
Now no one calls me Saint Terrell:
Not me kids me friends tax office
neighbours
nor the ex-thingie
(who writes me ' dear shithead')
Chialeah visited me in New Orleans and Los Angles
in the ' 70s and rambled on about other lives
realms, bodies
(the one she had now was
enough for me),
dimensions
It was all peu de chose to me
Her body and responses throughout the nights-days-weeks...
was enough for every life, dimension,
body...
She wanted my soul
I just wanted more of her body
(the physical one she had with her then)
an equal trade in any man' s book
(eternity for a good fuck now).I have no idea where in the world she is
if at all she is on this planet
or whether in fact she now has my soul
(I' have sold, traded and given it away so often
~ whomever ends up with it is a loser for sure)
Maybe her daughters whose father(s)
could have been any number of us saints
are here still (as my dreams reveal)
But every once in awhile
when the day gets to me just a bit too
I remember her whispering

' Saint Terrell'

and my satisfied body and I escape
one more time.
Victor Harbor South Australia 1993
See https://neuage.org/picture_poems/may02/romo5-09.html

I went back to Maui for a few weeks putting my dog in a crate and took it with me. Realizing that it was impossible for me to travel easily about and look after a dog I gave it to someone soon after arriving back in Maui.
I met Francine in Lahaina. She was a portrait artist doing charcoal drawings of tourists. We fell in love the day we met, or at least I did. We flew back to the Big Island and lived in a State Park for a while in my tent. I had saved my unemployment money for the seven months I had been out of the Order and Francine and I had enough to go to New York. We flew to Seattle and stayed in Vancouver for a week, took a train across Canada, stopping for a few days in Medicine Hat, and after a stay in Montreal stopped to visit my parents in Clifton Park. My parents put Francine in a spare bedroom but we managed to sleep together and have lots of sex. We were probably the first ones to have sex in the house my parents were living in since they moved in. Well, at least the first heterosexual sex, heaven knows what my brother did between those walls.

The farm I grew up on became too much for my parents after first, my brother moved out then I left in the mid-1960s so they moved into my uncle’s house, a few yards up the road, on Route 9. Here, now, in 2004, the old farm and the house my parents moved to are all part of the cement parking lots and shopping centres that are nothing more than, exit 9, on the Northway. It is a strange thought to sit in the waiting room of a car wash (Jiffy Lube to be exact – kind of sexy sounding considering I once lived there) and try to picture where the exact spot that I had sex with Francine one Sunday morning after my parents went to church is. “Over there by the display of Michelin Tires is where I nailed her”

My brother, living in New York City found a place for Francine and I to live. Within a few weeks, Francine flew to Italy. I was devastated but she said she was going to art school and she had a chance to study with someone who was a portrait artist for some folks in the British Royal Family.
According to Francine, her parents sent her money to go. I never heard from her again and I spent years trying to figure out what happened. I had thought we were in love and would be together for many years. Her disappearance was sudden. Physically she would have been one of the most beautiful women I had
ever loved. She was talented, and I still have one of her drawings, thirty years later.

After Francine left, I wrote her hundreds of poems and spent the summer wanting to go to Italy to find her but I had no idea where to begin and instead I begin living with Betty Wise.

We  were children playing by the sea
skipping  rope in the sand telling secrets to seagulls
who  never had heard whisper
We  were children playing by the sea 
 Never knew that I would get caught in the skip rope
and  you would be carried away by the seagulls
 8-19-71 Montauk Pt. Long Island New York

Betty was a friend of my brother’s and we made love or had sex or whatever it was, we did, an hour or so after meeting. We moved in together a week later, renting a factory loft in lower Manhattan. Betty was Spanish or at least spoke Spanish. She taught English to Puerto Ricans using my poems as a learning device. We spent the winter quite happy together. There was a Puerto Rican nightclub downstairs from us and on weekends, I would only go back and forth out of our loft when Betty was with me as she could speak Spanish – perhaps I am a chicken at heart. There is something about everyone speaking a different language to make one feel insecure. Definitely old thinking. We lived in China the past three years and I love not having a clue what people around me are saying.
We spent a lot of time making our loft into a home. It covered a complete floor of a disused factory. I think it was one of my happier times and there was little to stress me out. I began painting my picture-poems during this time. Picture-poems would be a major part of my life from then on. I began by putting a few streaks of paint on a board and writing a poem beneath it. More than fifty years later I still have my first picture-poem I ever did.

Christmas 1971 with parents, Robert, Betty, Clifton Park

24. 1972 freedom
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Terrell Neuage, (dual citizen USA/Australia) is a South Australian/New York poet, writer, and digital artist known for his evocative poetry and extensive research on conversational analysis in on-line communciations (including communication in the AI era; from sharing information to making sense of it). His best-selling autobiographies;Leaving America (Before the After) & Leaving Australia (after) – exploring life as a hippie, brother in a California Cult (Holy Order of MANS) as Brother Terrell Adsit, Astrolger (40-years) to non-believer, and adventures in Australia, single parent, tofu manufacturer/street artist, China, the USA & fifty+ other ountries. From high school drop out, Shenendehowa Central School, Clifton Park, New York at age 16, back to school at age 44 (BA & Masters from Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia) to PhD from the University of South Australia at age 58 to knocking on your door at age 78.