"My mistress' eyes are nothing…"
…We wait.
For doctor calls,
nurse triage,
pharmacy fills
hospital beds
pressing 1,
then 3,
then 0,
then more numbers
and more
and more
and more
and then a voice
another voice
and then
a dead end.
Start over.
A doctor,
we need
a doctor
but
the wall
of admins
like fortresses
hide them
protect them
in gall.
Fighting
to live
beyond the
chains of care
of health-
no-
one-cares.
credit: thehealthcareblog.com
The trump-er grown loud in palsied anger
defeaned himself to the mad deranger
While…
One penless poet in an inkwell stared
down letter-less pages of his dreams bared
For…
The world’s gone bonkers at last I tell you
rightside up is sideways blowing up truth
As…
When growing rich means exploding idols
and viscous real estate steals upturn skulls
So…
Time then once and for all to scrap the deal
that fear-stuffed progress regressives pig squeal.
End.
Hate.
Coda:
“Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity.” Hippocrates
In Greece, Hippocrates freed medicine from magic,
deigning it dignified as the rational science.
Logically, medicine delivers cure, but
she’s sick again, for too long now.
No longer believing in time,
no hope sustains her.
We need magic.
When the blue of sky and sea meet on the sun’s canvas, the world’s ills dissipate like wave vapor, crashed, floated and sprayed, melding with motion, recycling life for us who pass through.
Buffoonery and lies flee then, preferring cyber print to airy flights and icy dives in the Earth’s teal liquid split from firmament in places and times like these: the road peeled back revealing popped village pockets like blisters.
Here, when the blues of stinging seas sob seabird song, throngs of the foolish schools of the unschooled turn to the sun, seeking to bleach wrongs white or pure golden.
No trace, no nothing’s wrong here, the luscious hues just right for jog by smiles and sweet sweaty necks peeking through white pressed cotton tees tucked in creased linen tennis shorts.
A former Welsh fortress by the ocean free stands no longer firm, gone now but for those unaffected running on, keeping the tepid in and the cracked walled out, improbable as a teapot set sail on a vapid cup of tea.
Cardiff by the Sea breezes by me now and blushes me bright with springy lies of lucky losers and terrible saints, infamy tamed palatably blue, the color of infinity.
“I was going to make you a cake, but I had no eggs,” she cried and then crumpled to the floor. No consoling her. She was crushed, fragile as the empty space where the egg carton used to be–a shadow of a former delicate, susceptible embryo container.
She too had been plucked from her mother’s warmth too soon, arresting her world in a devil’s playground of tears and fearful misfortunes always on the verge, always.
“It’s okay, really okay. It was their time to fly. You couldn’t have known. It’s not your fault. I love cake, but I love you more. Come up and sit beside me this time, just now.”
She wiped her nose in the plaid flannel folds of her elbow and rose. It was over.
“I’d say that the more a person is engaged with sexual activity as an open-ended adventure in which to explore sensory possibilities, the easier it will be to become orgasmic via nipple and breast stimulation,” says Queen. “The first step may simply be knowing that it’s possible.”
Alternet’s short article on “nipplegasms”(orgasms attained through nipple stimulation alone) not only explores this more-popular-than-you-think pleasure vehicle but confirms some simply comforting observations about self-framed sexual perceptions. The writer lays bare the facts (haha) that orgasms by nipple stimulation happens typically to those open to it. And those who are not, generally don’t have them:
Sexologist Carol Queen suspects those who have are likely armed with two specific skills: the ability to get very aroused and the willingness to explore sex as a full body practice.
In fact, nipplegasms are the second most common orgasm, according to experts interviewed in this article. Interesting.
Makes sense. The mind-body connection producing orgasm is no secret by now, so the right parts (sensitive or not too sensitive nipples), open attitude and vivid imagination reap the rewards. But not everyone enjoys nipples–or other erotic parts–touched.
The experts agree that cultural, familial and/or relgious perceptions of “right and wrong” sex most probably underpin what gets someone off and what hang-ups prevent orgasms. The author cites those with culturally divergent sexual attitudes as “in the BDSM world, where it is well-accepted that the whole body can be the source of erotic and exciting sensory experiences.”
So, moral of the story: when you consider your body one big sensor ready to be stroked, orgasms may fly from anywhere. And what could be bad about that?
credit: Flkr
I have this watch. A client gave it to me at the start of my law career. He was grateful for the care and concern I gave to his affairs, business and personal. I was hired to develop and negotiate contracts, defend his interests in litigation or sue people for wrongs committed against his business or person. He was my second client, the first being the one on whose behalf I sued him, the second client.
Mr. M, I’ll call him, was probably impressed that I successfully sued him. We settled for my client’s costs and damages, and at that time I could boast that my success record was 100%.
I worked for Mr. M for 7 or 8 years. He paid me a monthly retainer to do jobs small and large. Once, nearly thirty years ago, he called me at 4 a.m. at my apartment. I lived with my sister then and she answered the landline (all there was then). He said he needed to talk to me right away and to meet him at a specific address. When I got there, I found myself at a dock in Newport Beach–on a yacht.
I spent the day with Mr. M, talking him down from an alchohol-induced craze about a fight he had with his wife. We mostly talked, then navigated a dinghy to the club across the bay for more drinks. I did not drink. He later thanked me and insisted on paying for my time. A few months later, he gave me the watch.
The watch had belonged to Nat King Cole, according to Mr. M. There was a story about the meeting that I do not recall. Honestly, I don’t remember whether it was Nat King Cole’s or belonged to someone else in the story about Nat King Cole. It was so long ago.
On the back of the watch is an inscription that has nothing to do with Nat King Cole ostensibly. I believe it reads: “Agie Trembly From Mary–April 20th, 1944.”
Each time I wear the watch, which still keeps time near perfectly, I think about Mary. Who is she? What was her relationship with Trembly? She did not engrave “love” as in “Love Mary”. Were they ever lovers? She is just Mary but he has a first and last name. Was Trembly her boss?
So much war and destruction on this date, the SS Paul Hamilton, filled with ammunition having exploded, killing all 580 aboard. A German-launched torpedo blew them up in the Mediterranean. The war would not end for another five months.
What did Mary think of the tragedy? What did she hope to impart, gain or express in giving Trembly the watch, a Rolex, no less? I imagine her giving this gift with hope in her heart during such desperate times, men off fighting in wars and she left behind to read about it in the papers. She must have worked to fill the jobs men left open, or she came from a family with means, whether earned or inherited.
I imagine her longing and pensive like this:
Perhaps the image is older than she, but the hint of forlorn in her posture, her gaze, might very well be the same.
There was a time when Mary had hopes or gratitude or platonic appreciation for a man, who might have returned from the war or never gone at all, being too young or afflicted in some way.
Mr. M died of esophageal cancer. Actually he died of an allergic reaction to the chemotherapy to treat the cancer some twenty odd years ago. He was a chain smoker and a drinker, a charitable man, a big man turned frail by disease. I saw him last at the court house, his brother in law prosecuting a case for him. I had since broadened my practice to 50 or 60 cases by then, and he had fallen to hard times.
For a long time after his death, I thought I heard or saw him. His presence haunted me for about a year, speaking a phrase or tossed word only he would have spoken. I remember the time he told me that I was not brilliant but a good, hard working lawyer. That stuck with me.
The man was a colorful client, an old time door to door salesman grown successful in the peripherals of the music business of the 70s and 80s. I credit him with founding the footing of my practice and sustaining it for years.
We were not close, not friends, but his unsolicited gift speaks to me, arouses mystery and memory, recalled in time-worn haze, our lives intersected in cloudy images, like the flattened engraving on the back of a Rolex watch–from Mary.
I have the most difficult time imagining let alone explaining the Big Bang. There is this thing to which there is no outside but contains everything–all space, time, motion, light, life, stars, planets, galaxies, moons, atmosphere, gravity and imagination. I can only envision a balloon expanding that captures a portion of its essence, its configuration. But balloons are plenums of sorts.
ple·num
ˈplenəm,ˈplēnəm/
noun
1.
an assembly of all the members of a group or committee.
2.
PHYSICS
a space completely filled with matter, or the whole of space so regarded.
I refer to the second definition when I think of the universe’s (or multiverse’s) origins. But no one knows whether the universe is a plenum. Our minds can only understand to the reaches of our imaginations.
One day, over 17 years ago, I lay with my then 2 and 1/2 year old first born curled in fetal sleep. To this day, I can recall so crisply the angst I felt with another life brewing inside me. “How could I possibly love another child when my heart is so full with this one here?” I thought in a painfully probably hormone-induced teary-eyed moment.
Though quite illogical, the angst grew during my second pregnancy. Today, as that second born turns 17, I reflect on the framework of her arrival–as a storied gift to her sister and an ill-conceived mathematical challenge to my miscalculated quantity of allotted love.
Like the Big Bang theory, the mystery of beginnings, dimensions and edges to inside and outside belong to love–which is definitely not a plenum.
Happy birthday to my brown-eyed wonder.
So this happened late last year, apparently. Side Chick protest song–ok.
Joseph Campbell
In one of the Upanishads it says, when the glow of a sunset holds you and you say ‘Aha,’ that is the recognition of the divinity. And when you say ‘Aha’ to an art object, that is a recognition of divinity. And what divinity is it? It is your divinity, which is the only divinity there is. We are all phenomenal manifestations of a divine will to live, and that will and the consciousness of life is one in all of us, and that is what artwork expresses.
Joseph Campbell, “Creativity,” The Mythic Dimension, p. 154
“Mom, how does your eye work?” a five year old once asked me.
“I don’t know off hand, but let’s draw one,” I deflected.
“Aha,” the little one exclaimed when it was finished.
In the gaze of the other 