Sparkley Surrender

Ratty red curtains sparkley
with surrender light up
the room you came to 
live in.

Prelude to you, my
life was squashed
and picked clean
bone dry by
kinfolk and lineage —
ostensibly with care.

Now you arrive
with gleaming photographs
and pink bubble gum
lustful thoughts
and honeyed kisses
that drive us together
and forevermore crush 
The Arbor of Blue Inertia.

The Red Thread

there is this thread

red in color

invisible to most eyes

no not just one thread, but many

we are attached to one another

mother to daughter to son

to father to teacher to friend

to the woman huddled on the street corner

and the man dancing on the high-wire

like spiders we are cradled

sensing the pulses

the rhythms of the universe

Apron Strings

How thin

spindly, frayed they

have become whipped

by time bleached

by the sun found

dangling in the far

off reclusive corners of

my memory bank where

these fingers now older

than yours reach

out to grab to

deftly check our bond

to tighten the knot to

tether us together

forever in time

"I want someone to tie to my lonely apron strings" Everything But The Girl

My Mother's Apron

It smelled of bleach and boiled cabbage. It was the most comforting thing I remember about my mother. I had to have been at the most three years old. Whenever the world became too much for me to handle I would bury my face in her apron and wrap my arms around her legs or as much as I could get around them with my short arms. Sixty five years later it is as present as this right here right now. The world can be just as terrifying today but the only thing I can wrap my arms around is a memory.

float away

When I was 20 years old I had a dream. In the dream I am in front of the family church. A church I had attended my entire life.
I was familiar with every aspect of it. From the choir above where I used to kiss the occasional boy and sing the occasional "Michael row your boat ashore", to the pew below where my older sister would pinch my arms and pull off tiny bits of my skin while I was not supposed to scream out in pain, I knew this church.
In the dream I am in front of the church.  The Seuss like tree that I had played in and around for years is standing tall and prominent. My family is gathered about in front of this tree. I suddenly notice my Mother. She is standing next to me. She reaches her arm up and takes hold of a balloon. She ascends into the blue sky. She goes up so high I can no longer see her. She disappears.
I realize this is not a happy occurrence and wake up. I think: my Mother is going to die. In a few months I turned 21 and 6 days later she died. It was sudden and unexpected. The last time I saw her was on my birthday. As my gift, she gave me a coffee mug monogrammed with my initial. I kept the mug for years until the handle fell off and finally the entire thing disintegrated.   When I see balloons that have been set free in the sky with the thought to set free the spirits of the dead, I think of my Mother.

Balloons

Louise walked wearily across the parking lot. It was another day of kissing her boss’s very large and needy ass. As she approached her car she saw that something was not right.

“What was all that color about? “

“My god, it’s balloons.”

Thoughts of bosses and asses faded as her mind spun.

“No one else has a key to my car. How did those balloons get in there?”

A yellow smiley face looked back at her and said “Happy Birthday.” She unlocked the car and released half a dozen balloons so she could sit behind the wheel. The smiley face looked down at her as it slowly rose to heaven. The smile said “thank you” as it faded out of sight.

“I have got to go my sister’s. I have got to show her this.”

Her sister was standing on her front lawn as if she was expecting Louise to drive up at that very moment.

“Oh how wonderful, you remembered. Billy will be so happy. He so loves balloons. It was his birthday wish.”

Try as she might, Louise could not close her mouth. She had forgotten that it was Billy’s birthday and she didn’t know he loved balloons all that much.

“But, but I didn’t remember that it was his birthday and these balloons … these balloons … I don’t know what to …”

She lost her function of speech. This was too much.

“Don’t worry, her sister said, it all works out, even if we don’t understand all the details. Now, let’s go in the house and join the party.”

It can happen

It can happen
what you dream
can peel off from
your Corpus callosum
and differentiate.

The famous men
do it and live to feather
pillows with new wives.

Phil Spector did it by
mistake Robert Blake no
excuse Burroughs admits
to bad aim O.J. guilty
as sin Norma Mailer failed.

Another bed, another story

Jack reached out across the bed. Sleeping, dreaming, he reached in the wrong direction and fell to the floor with a loud crack. You would think that that would wake him up, it didn’t. He lay on the carpet snoring and dreaming, wondering where she was. What did wake him up was the cloud of dust stirred up by his sudden impact with the floor. The dust, mostly dead mite carcasses tickled his nose and he started to sneeze. A violent series of convulsions got his attention.

He groggily looked around. This looks familiar. I think I’ve been here before. Slowly he climbed back in bed, glanced at the other side. That was a pretty good dream. I want to go back there. But of course that would not happen. Instead it was replaced by a nightmare. A violent argument, words said, a gun was pulled. He woke with a start. Oh no, not that.

He reached over, turned on the bedside light. That’s when he saw the blood on the other pillow. She was lying on the floor on the other side with his gun in her hand.

Observation Participation

10 names for Bed

1. Pink Raw Twin
2. Lonely Conscription Shikibuton
3. Sleep No More Pillow Top
4. Rosebud Airbed
5. Faraway Trundle
6. Slip In Quietly Foam
7. Baby Now Futon
8. Nobody Cares Olympic Queen
9. Equilux Delux
10. Possibility Canopy

Sounds in the Night

Helga turned towards her husband Klaus in the dim light,

“I think they’ve finally are going to be quiet now. They’ve been going at their reveling all day and through the night. I haven’t had a moment of sleep. Klaus, Klaus are you listening to me.”

“Snore, snort, snore”

“How can you be sleeping? The noise, that carrying on, it’s all too much!”

“Huh, wha, snuffin, zzzzzz”

“Am I the only one bothered by this behavior? They have no restraint, no good breeding. They were having too much fun.”

“Snort, snore.”

“We’ve got to do something, somebody should let the authorities know about this disruption, otherwise there’ll be no end to this. I want you to go down to the neighborhood association office and tell them how upset we are. Klaus, honey are you listening to any thing I’m saying?”

“Snuffle, huh, yes, yes, I’ll clean the garage, dooont cha worry … snooore”

Off in the distance another peal of laughter rang out followed by a chorus of guffaws.

Lets go Crazy tonight

"We talk about being able to control ourselves. But self control is a rare and remarkable virtue"

Carl Jung  1875 ~ 1961

Lets go crazy tonight

throw away our virtue

run over our self controll

drink to excess and have

hangovers that last all week

Lets go crazy tonight

ruin our reputations

scream in the halls of justice

hunt down and kill the

meddling back fence talkers

We are humans

we are animals

we are turning over cars

and abandoning sickly jaundiced babies

so we can drink till we puke

The Red Book

So, you see, I’m on my way to see my analyst. She goes strictly by the book, “The Red Book”. I’m reviewing my dreams from last night so I got something to talk about, when it hits me. Actually strictly speaking it hits my car, and you won’t believe this, it’s a mattress. How awesome is that. I mean mattress, dream, do you get the connection? Boy, she’s going to love this. In addition to that, the mattress is stuck to the front of the car and I can’t see where I’m going. I can just see her furiously paging through that book of hers. Old Carl never in a million years would have thought of this. That’s when I heard the screams. Two guys running towards me, on the freeway no less. If I didn’t have that mattress on the front of the car I would have killed them. Lucky guys!

Bed Slide

Jose and Jon had tied it down good. The ropes went through the windows and around and around again. No one could accuse them of laziness.  Stupid yes, lazy no. The 1977 Hornet was way past its prime by 20 years and a total rust bucket. They had just enough gas to get there and get back. Home was a shadowy thing at best for these two grifters, so anyplace that offered a flop for the night was taken seriously, even if they had to bring their own bed. In the morning they could worry about how they would get the gas money to return to La Casa Encendida and win the Grand Prize for Best Poem of 1999.
Jose was not nervous as he knew La Toya and she was in charge of ballot counting. Lovely La Toya, servile and deferential to his every whim, she would help him win and bring home the trophy, not to mention the cash prize of five thousand dollars. Jose and Jon could live a few good months on it.
And home? That could wait. For now they had to concentrate on just getting there with the bed. The ropes they had found were old and degraded from the sun. These ropes were almost dust. Jose had noticed this but did not want to hurt Jon's fragile feelings so he did his best to wench down the mattress to the roof and now it was starting to slip down the back of the ancient Hornet. It was a perfect slide just made for the bed to slip out onto the freeway. Jon sighed, "We lost another one".  At this rate they would never get to sleep.

en la cama

The blue house of our dreams

fades into the green morning

sun lit, the open window inhales the day

the perspiration soaked sheets drying

our feet push down as

the floor rises to meet us

the sweet fragrance of another day

The Collective Unconscious

The Collective Unconscious exists

in the pinky finger of an infant.

Wind sways through the eyebrows

of Frida Kahlo and

it is there too,

waiting to jump on the

next passing train and pollinate

our sleeping conductor who

brings those dreams we want to forget

those dreams we want to remember,

depending upon who 

shares our bed.

The Flyer

As the trucks were being loaded, the vanguard of the ant column milled about aimlessly. Waving their antennae in ant-talk, they all said as one, “We were told that there would be food here, but where is it?”

Meanwhile back at the café, the man at the table was handed a flyer by a neatly dressed army officer. It read:

“Citizens! You can now go about your regular activities. The crowd of disrupters has peacefully dispersed after hearing a clear presentation by a government spokesman that their concerns would be considered.”

He shrugged, wiped his face dry and got up and toddled off to check on his rabbits.

Ant Trail

As he sat crying
she was dying
around the corner behind the church
hunched up under a small cobwebbed
rabbit hutch.
The amount of
people who died
that day was impossible to count.
Military Experts put it in the hundreds.
To her it felt like thousands.
                                                             All the ant trails led to it.
                                                 

The Esplanade

I blinked as my eye followed the line of ants as it crossed the sun scorched pavement. It led from somewhere under the shade of the paw-paw tree and then across the esplanade off towards the abandoned mission church. I sat at a small table out of the sun, nursing a warming lime drink, batting away the occasional lazy fruit fly. I was waiting for you. My faint hope that you would come was fading as if following that line of ants off into the distance. I couldn’t get up the energy to wipe the single tear slowly making its way down my cheek.

Bugs

• bed bugs
• big bugs
• red bugs
• bugs

Luscious

On the side of a prickly pear cactus

Two bugs were engaged in coitus

She flushed and turned red

When he hopped out of bed

And called her carmine skin quite luscious

Carmine Sunshine

The color depends on the amount of sun.
Those fingers dipped
into the cochineal pull
down the sky.
The rays
the warmth
the brighter
the sun shines
the red gets deeper.
Follow it to the center.
See the sun again,
pull it down, drag it down.

The color depends upon it.
Follow it to the center,
feel the sun again.
Go deeper, deeper still
This is no maze
this, is my heart.

The Maze

Have you ever found yourself standing in a maze, not sure how you got there and you have only your feet to rely on to find a way out? Ok now, first take one step, try the left. Lift it slowly. Don’t look up, you’ll get dizzy. Place it down slowly, then the right. Are we making progress yet? Breathe deeply, concentrate, nothing to be afraid of. Do you hear that bird? Such a sweet song. That smell, like eucalyptus on a warm day? I think I remember now. The map out of here was drawn on a wall, a red wall. You must remember. It’s our only hope.

FEET

Something
about a
ballerina
with these
feet
who can tell