🔥🌸

I knocked on the trunk of a twisted red cedar tree, I whispered a prayer to the resurrection fern grown from its branches, I breathed in the sweet smell of its bosom, and I felt the warmth of life beneath its moisture laden bark. The last thing I stared at with intention, love, and acceptance before going under was this aptly named photo print called “Doom and Bloom” by Chase Mullen. And I am infinitely grateful for the warmth, life, and resurrection I came into after my procedure. Here’s to owning, honing, and wielding every opportunity to give thanks and be the best version of myself in my 38th perennial bloom around our main sequence mass of nuclear fusion.

The Red-shouldered Hawk’s Lament

“All energy flow is according to whims of the great magnet” was something I read in my human form. Suddenly, I felt embarrassed by the poverty of a sentiment I had no right to feel as I soared lazily like a fly who has seen an extra rotation on a window pane, trapped between life and death. Handshakes are funny. How can you tell anything about a person by how firm their grasp is?

When I was bound by two legs walking on the ground, I began to believe that this was hell. And that we weren’t here to learn lessons about ourselves as ouroboros the snake eats its own tale. I wanted to see within, to know the collective “us”; to eat my own story and then tell it at a later time, in another life.

Isn’t it odd we were addicted to boxes. And putting what is dead within them? There are some who are here to torch and torture, living an oath of burning and burying all in their paths. And they change faces and their masks, sometimes even their skins. I was called to this fate. I have come back to test and give away the key to finding meaning, just to see what will happen. From above.

Real angels don’t have wings. They wing it with their great handshakes, but always done in such a hurry. They speak in ways I’ve never heard before. And I know it is the truth. I always know them by their electricity, I feel it on the thermal waves as I’m riding amidst white wisps and dark cavalry blue-black sky. Not unlike stars or lightning: a crackle in the fabric of the night.

It has been a long time since I have held the pulse of a body. Feathered, so streamlined, I’m trying it out. Not here for anything. Only to set it free and let it go. No time for love. Love that doesn’t include honesty does not deserve to be called love. Love is a cannibal. It’ll make you eat your own flesh and blood. But the eating is symbolic. How we consume each other to fulfill our own needs. But sometimes the truth speaks from a peaceful place. Don’t let the taste of failure cloud your judgment. Trust your gut instincts. And then, eat your heart out. We are fractured creatures trying to become whole.

I recalled briefly what love was, shed tears at the remembrance of an explanation that did not match the reality. A great deception as unlike up here where there is a contract between wind and wing. A lock and key. Love is liberty. Truth is justice, just us. Knowing the beginning and knowing an end will always come. Knowledge is the past. And wisdom is the presence of learning.

Brazen Death Lies

Mark well the full moon’s light for in gray-scale silence, a broken heart bounty hunter searches.

Skin luminous with cerulean veins; as though they are threads of color sweeping through white marble.

A formidable figure, angrily and crudely constructed, like a Molotov cocktail. Watching, waiting.

Make whole your heart, no matter how many times it feels smashed to pieces. It costs nothing and everything at the same time.

At the Corner of Peach and Stonewall

The bare, early evening earth smells sour; likely elicited by loud protests from the grass seeds’ paltry attempt at regrowth. The sinking sun swims lazily over my left shoulder, creating dandelion reflections in my off-soil colored baileys and coffee.

Enjoying my walk through a cemetery where I’d often flown kites as a kid; long open spaces and very few bodies along the path to interrupt my kitestring. At least very few bodies with breath left in their lungs. I found myself stopped in front of a headstone that read Cathartes. Odd considering the Latin root for vultures as well as the cathartic saunters the graveyard grounds provide for me. Amidst tombs I find solace.

What’s in a name? Everyone remembers Romeo’s sweet-smelling rose. Juliet, his muse. The prosaic albeit prophetic comparison, when one also considers that roses die. So what’s in a name? Simply a feckless attempt at capturing the beauty of life in a word? I prefer concrete imagery like looking up to see the fresh-hatched toenail moon while passing by a worn and woeful woman in her hooker-lipstick-red jumper laying down white four o’clocks, a fitting flower for a fallen fellow. A long lost lover? Or perhaps a child, stolen too soon, leaving lines on her face…a hole in her heavy heart.

I walked backwards so as not to disturb her ritual, an abeyance to a grief that never truly unlatches its hooks from one’s soul. I stumbled slightly only to turn around and witness a youthful scene of 4 boys fishing in a small pond on the near side of the necropolis plot. I waved but they were so caught up in their fin finding frenzy I might as well have been a ghost myself. I peeked at my reflection from the water’s edge and a sudden notion occurred: Have you ever caught a glimpse of yourself through someone else’s lens and realized you HATE the person they see? I have. I buried that thought and continued on my silent stroll.

National Poetry Month Haiku of the Day

30. Save the best for last
    kernel image takes form brought
    to you through haiku
31. Pain penultimate
    to wisdom a taste is bliss
    yet agony too
32. I’ve hardly slept in
    this dull and commonplace bed
    dragged down by shadows
33. The heart is smarter
    than the head even when it
    isn’t cuz it’s dead
34. At 9000 feet
    the air resonates sun soaked
    pine and mossy streams
35. Nothing like nights on
    the cold hard ground to remind
    us we were once wild
36. I swear there’s a tough
    Outdoor babe hid inside my
    Squishy indoor bod
37. Unmistakable
    The petrichor smell after
    fleeting desert rain
38. Sink thy battleship
    to sabotage self makes for
    great consternation
39. I’m immortal in
    the presence of your danger
    A transient scent
40. Reverberant heart
    fast as runaway rail cars
    loud like late spring hail
41. Dig deep beyond the
    suddenness, unexpected
    daisies soothe the soul
42. Heart liquidation
    going out of business sale
    grab one that still beats
43. Friends will come and go
    etching subconscious echoes
    haunting faded dreams
44. These pheromones are
    elusive wnveloped you
    crave insatiably
45. Halfway there is great
    Until you realize the next
    half’s more treacherous
46. You look perfect in
    Red But you look good in all
    Colors And nothing
47. Sleep miasmal dreams
    Those little slices of death
    How I covet them
48. Tears in my pensieve
    poems paintings petals passed
    notes wine stained newsprint
49. Silence It sounds good
    Except when it doesn’t or
    No one’s listening
50. Muddled memories
    trapped on the tilt-o-whirl of
    time round round we go
51. I can’t make your life
    Better but I can cheer from
    The nosebleed section
52. There’s a bluebird in
    my heart he’s full like the moon
    whimsical beaming
53. Full moon luminous
    Inky black river beneath
    Like chocolate fondant
54. One year of tumult
    Happy anti-versary
    Boondoggled again
55. Wildflowers hidden
    treasures amidst the desert
    survival masters
56. Coronavirus
    It’s QuaranTeenage Wasteland
    Yeah we’re all wasted
57. Twenty-something girls
    Fabulous til they’re with the
    Man who broke your heart
58. I love facial a
    Symmetry Facymmetry
    Coined it you beauties
59. Land of Enchantment
    575! Haiku or
    LC? Ask Nietzsche

Language Arts

hold fast to happiness
for when happiness hides
life is a drifting raft
swallowed by the tides

hold fast to happiness
for when happiness floats away
life is like being lost at sea
on a dark and stormy day

Letter to a Drifter

He was always my intellectual match and conversation was never dull or boring. Perhaps clouded by a night of poring over each other for hours drinking dingy basement-bar booze, wondering who might make the first move, but it was never dull or boring. It was bound we would separate, prophetic by the virtue that he grifted me away from friends who saw him more clearly than I, my eye was fogged over like the horizon on that first frosty fall morning; obscured by a shimmery dash of humor–laughing at the voicemail he left right in front of me after I relinquished my phone number, something I used to yield control over much less unabashedly. Also, a dusting of hope–for a future I wanted to share with someone shiny, new.

The 2am phone call nearly went unnoticed, it woke me but almost blended right back into the dream I was consumed by. He’d drifted in and out of my life over the years, coming and going but detachable, never staunchly staying put and to me this did not seem amiss, I always knew I couldn’t keep him. Not like a talisman to be worn or carried around everywhere or a collector’s item on a shelf.

Yes a fancy reminiscence. Except the me he remembers is 22, 130lbs, and a force to be reckoned with. Now 29, shaped like a squash or some other disagreeable gourd, and banal even on my best days. We planned to meet for a cuppa joe tomorrow before he heads up to DC. I hope the disappointment isn’t stronger than the coffee.

What is it about the men of my past? Present tense relationships are impossible with these disreputable creatures but they come running with a remembrance of me then, now. The post-apocalyptic me, a shadow of my former self. Wraith-like, I wondered out the window. My mind, mutable as the seasons, recalling my glory days–treacherous and agile as a goddess of war.

And so I paddled away

I was pretty much convinced he has another girlfriend. Which didn’t really ever even bother me. I found it amusing; the waiting for the bomb to drop. Pathos was not a requirement there, because the devil was always listening. And I, like a cat in a bag, had nothing to lose…just waiting to do. In my mind I’d already gone to Oregon or somewhere far away and intangible; somewhere I couldn’t really get to but only imagined the satisfaction it would bring by quelling my need for escape.

We stopped on our way out of town, fleeing from our old life, at the Belmont Stakes where together we gambled wantonly, consumed copious amounts of mind altering substances, danced til daybreak and had a grand ol’ time. Me in my fancy hat and he dressed like a Dapper Dan–suspenders, seersucker suit, and all. So why were we running away? We left the dogs and the cat, barely made it out with the clothes that would fit in our raggedy backpacks. And I realized I was following him with blind hope, shreds of ghostly words, empty and hollow on the consummate end, a fable to my disillusioned manic self ever portending stoicism.

Maybe I should just slip away with my despair and count my losses. Evade the inevitable truth, however unwittingly I stumbled upon it. Watching the horses race round the bend gave me a new sense of revival, a seeming urgency to speed away from that moment and cross the country or even oceans alone. Instead of my emotions conspiring against me it was his company that began to draw out my paranoia. That fleeting glimpse of freedom, a vision brought on by the power and majesty of those thunderous thoroughbreds, was just the accidental impetus I needed.

Confidence, my easy-going nature, and humor had ever been my fortes and favored by the men in my life. This particular gentleman had somehow overlooked these traits or perhaps mistaken them and been hoodwinked by some other quality; but either way he took no alarm when I grabbed my knapsack and headed to the bar for another julep. I only looked over my shoulder once to see if his eyes were following me. They weren’t and though I had probably dodged a bullet by finally sliding away on soapy heels I felt a moment of panic and second guessed myself.

In that same moment along came a sign, literally and perhaps from the deities above, “Free Canoe, Looking to Lighten My Load and Perhaps Pick Up Something Better WorthTrading.” That’s when I knew what I had to do. The diamond was somewhere floating around the bottom of my bag in a folded envelope that had seen too many creases. I approached the man in his shitty VW van and asked if he was in a mood to barter. He smiled a bean-toothed grin and said it depended what I had to offer, but the look on his face suggested he had assumed it wasn’t much and might come from between my legs. When I produced the gemstone he laughed at me but a second glance at my resolute and unabashed composure told him I meant business and that I was as serious as the future for a racehorse with a broken leg. He became unsettled and wasn’t satisfied with simply giving me the canoe. He demanded to know where I planned to go and offered to provide me food, water, a tarp, warmer clothes, and a ride to the nearest river.

Four hours later with provisions a plenty and promises to write or call and a brief exchange of his contact information, I was ready to undertake the most ludicrous adventure from a little beach at Rockaway Park outside of Queens. I hopped in and got as comfortable as could be expected and began to paddle. I figured I could manage to stay fairly safe as long as I kept the coastline in sight and slept on land under the canoe at night. I rowed mindlessly wondering if my decision to leave it all behind was a wise one for what seemed like the better part of the day, but the sun appeared to have made up its mind not to set.

I awoke in the dregs of another sweaty confusion after the third night of the same dream. That scream…soul shattering. Had it come from me? I had thought that I would always be simultaneously too old to hook in and hold on or to be bold and break loose from my restraints but I had finally taken it upon myself to move on to greener pastures. I packed up my little camp and pushed out into the ocean once more hoping I was making legitimate progress and that no one was out looking for me. With the wind behind me and the sunrise to my right I moved northward and prayed that the warm ocean currents would be kind and aid my progress. I had nothing to lose and no-one to look back to and that empowered my spirit to float on for as long as I could knowing that wherever I ended up I could start anew without reservation or judgment.

When I Grow Up…

I want to be a writer. Hitchhiking in the desert and drinking ayahuasca tea. I want to imbibe heavily, whiskey in particular, and say nonsensical things while wearing coke bottle glasses with a beaded chain. To be the one who gets invited to all the parties, dinner or otherwise. Serve me covetous love and crazed loathing. And when the train’s coming through I’ll jump on. Travel to wherever, me my thoughts and I…

“Dip your hand into the water just so your first two fingertips are damp” said sister Ana Maria to my kid brother and me that morning during catechism. I let him go first, eager to obey and prove he was a good boy, avidly making the sign of the cross while I carefully set my hand in just above The Holy water so as not to touch it. Coming from the place I had just been, a commune with God seemed sinfully unadulterated.

I listened to the sepulchral silence of the sea. So rare yet enveloping when experienced. Whether you are a sailor out in the calm before the storm or shore bound as the tide recedes back as if taking an infinitely drawn breath. It is unmistakable in its profoundness. And it never bodes well. I dreamt of killing myself once and in the dream as I poured over the intricacy of each uniquely blue vein pulsing through my wrist I began to wonder if anyone else had ever taken the time to appreciate the intimacy of their own demise. Then I made the first cut and watched the vermilion liquid run its course and join the crystalline bathwater.

There’s a fat little bumblebee  on my porch. Every morning I find him seemingly dead, yet every afternoon as the temperature raises I see him climbing the screen; it has been so for three days. Thrice I’ve tried to set him free and thrice I’ve found him lethargic and torpid in the early morning chill then humming back to life with the sun’s radiance, a tortuous dance between life and death in a prison of his own making. I decided to let him be.

I want to catalog the lives of greater human beings than I and crush the literary competition into dust. I want to speak 8 other languages, German, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Mandarin, French, Hindi, and Russian so I can converse with all the diverse populations of the world while I sojourn around it on a peddler’s penny making and marauding memories.

Intellectual Quasar

The snow had stopped sometime in the middle of the night and as I sat in the chilly, early morning air, the clouds had taken on an opaque and seamless white color the texture of butter cream making it difficult to tell where the rooftops ended and the sky began. Since sleep had become elusive of late, rare like the sighting of a mystical creature, I mashed my third cigarette into the side of the smoke pail and thought about faces.

Well, rather I thought about one face. A face I had grown very fond of especially with the rarity of dreams and persistent white noise, visible, palpable on the backs of my eyelids. No sleep, only whispers and waterfalls of wide awake thoughts uncontrollably moving outward from my mind like a Fibonacci spiral. So many mornings I chose to drown the cerebral circus by finding things I liked about that face. It soothed my anxiety and gave me one focus rather than 54 million.

I crawled back into bed hoping that without my shirt or hat I didn’t smell too much like tobacco. His untamed hair lay across the far side of his face but I could still see the gentle crows feet by his close eye. And those eyelashes, two-tone bronze and blonde, not quite glinting in the unusual grayish hues of winter light peeking through his second story loft windows. Time almost seemed to stand still while I stared, he asleep so peacefully as if the universe was inside him and I nor nothing else around us existed. I decided to count the lashes but didn’t get very far before he stirred and turned into me, his face in my neck, breathing deeply and calm. The momentary quiet of my mind interrupted by his comfort adjustment.

Without any features of his face to fixate on, the whirlwind within began to hum back to life. What in the world makes a brain so active during normal lulling times remains a mystery to me. I pondered life, death, the whys, the hows, the what ifs, the beginning of time, the infinity of space, the nature of the beast that will become my future, and so on down a stream of consciousness I can’t seem to control. At this point I’m tense and too warm from his body heat so I push away swinging one leg out of the covers to cool down. Also, counting backwards from 100 seems like a good way to refocus and maybe even fall asleep for a little while.

99…98…97…96…82…81…80…75…74…73… and the thoughts fly out of nowhere rushing me like a wave. Imagine an atom with all its electrons whizzing around unimaginably fast, chaotic, constant. This is my mental state for hours at a time. Upon realizing I was side tracked from counting back I tried to start again but by 70 I was back to the abyss, the bottomless chasm of useless and worrisome thoughts.

Then I remembered my affinity for faces. Like a raven, which can recognize and remember human emotion and faces that have been kind or cruel, I have a storage vault of compiled faces that make up the things I admire the most in a person. And this man beside me embodies many of those traits. I am rapt thinking about the likeness of his face to so many invaluable passers by in my life. Each reminiscence when he smiles or frowns or laughs or grimaces reminds me of a time and place I once loved before and stored away for safe keeping.

The happiness brought on by recalling good people, places, and faces began to numb the tornado-like malice of my mind. My eyes finally fluttered to a close and my pace of breathing began to slow and align with his. A train rumbled by, steady and rhythmic rather than the usual upheaval into restlessness. And I drifted down into the watery chasm of a quasi-waking sleep.