I took this journey for love, not death. Each night, Captain reminds me, could be my last. Each day, I'm blessed with light, wind, and salt. Strange, my being taught to command men. My duties I fulfill, thankful for my life.
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Dred
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Petals cry as the sunlight, so long gone, returns, oblivious to small sadness. Life pulps through cold limbs; corpuscles burn. The flower opens its eyes and takes in the sky and the fire. Red petals soak up the blues as they stretch in ecstasy and throb till they spy sunset. The joy that laughed with the sun whispers to the stars.
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I’m tucked away in a small cabin ’mid your vast forest and float upon your world of love, breathing in and out your atmosphere, the stars twinkling ’neath your sun.
Tucked In Nonesuch
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For you: fine lines. I press with care; the ink bleeds.
Splotch
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I wear a white dress with a pink ribbon in the hem. I hold my white parasol, sit, and exchange glances with your sharp eyes. You lean in and my lashes fall. A red-hot poker melts a fat candle without touching it and the exposed wick ignites. You just want to play around. My strings lie loose on my chest. Fiddle with them. Wind them taut to a perfect pitch. Play till they sing. Wind, wind, wind till they snap. Break them. All along I just wanted you to break them: just break them well.
If Umbrellas Could Talk
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Gazing at iridescent coals we remember at leisure the wet logs we used then jettisoned, the dry ones we trucked too many of, the rolled magazines the fire choked on, the lighter fluid the flames absorbed as quick as we poured, the ineffectual pop of the lighter sacrificed to the pile. When we placed leaf next to leaf, stick over leaves, stick next to stick, log over sticks, log next to log, tending over logs, we had s’mores for a time, tending fire.
Tender
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I’ve driven into the garage of this old man, a neighbor. He has 2 MGs in their original antique green. I’m driving a newly issued one, white with black trim. The dogs are with me, in the back seat. He looks at me, turns the lights off, and closes the garage door.
I sit there for a couple of minutes in the dark and don’t know what to do. He peaks back in and asks if I’m going to come in.
We walk past his first driveway which is where I probably meant to park and overshot to that second one, which had a drive branching from the first one. I walk into his house; it’s a converted office. There are people under his employ, including a bored secretary. It’s the kind of boredom where the employee isn’t appreciated and the employee finds no value in the organization she’s helping.
He seems to think that I like Benzes. Well, I like my MG. I try to say that of course I don’t like Benzes but feel too rude to say it.
I finger my way through his metal stand of papers on display. There is a religious bent to him. I pick up a dry, medical-oriented write up on women entitled Demon. I’m kind of laughing to myself in disbelief. Just then, his wife peeks out from the inside of the office. There is a kind of I’m-trapped-here-with-this-intellectual-domineering-man shift in her eyes. Well, I put it back.
I continue to look for the Benz write up. I pick up a proposal for school lunches. So, people can just sit down and write up school lunch proposals like this… at the same time I consider a possibility I hadn’t realized before, then the sadness of one guy thinking up an entire school lunch for kids… Poor kids.
Demon Documentarian
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I’m a very good student at a military academy. We go through combat exercises, one troop against another, and our troop does excellently.
Now, I find myself in charge of my own troop. We come across one reconnaissance officer from the enemy troop; my entire troop is all thumbs. I realize I needed to have been giving them orders. They didn’t know what to do.
The games are halted by the commander trainers. They are dismayed at my lack of readiness.
I lay down in my bunk. The other group of trainees have left for games. I’m tired; there is no one left in the room; maybe one other person, a girl.
I think, spitefully, “if this is just becoming a place where I am giving the orders, then all of this is bullshit. I don’t have to do this. This just isn’t for me. I’m not doing army stuff if I don’t have to.”
Now I’m Commander and I Quit
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After dropping you off, I find myself in a friendly gaze with God or The Great Mother. I smile for a blissful moment, returning occasionally, humbler each time. It shifts a twinge down right, down left, journeying its way down the hidden pathways in the glass it clings to.Precipitation
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A certain inner peace, quite safe and pleased with herself, wherein there is a certain knowing of the world whereby wherever she alights upon the world that same pleasant fastidiousness whereupon she chuckles with herself she chuckles with her acquaintance wherewith the unknown and uncouth are handily known and tamed: a traveling tea party