"My mistress' eyes are nothing…"
She wrapped me in her quilted smile,
then torched the salty fabric of us, tear stained and aching.
She knees cruel in the balls.
And I love her that way just the same.
She hangs me up to dry,
then cuts me down for air.
The breathing windows of us,
pulsating walls setting chairs rocking, us inside,
lulled in four-arm sleep.
Alone on the Heath, a purple flower
where there once was dry reedy sand,
you, friend, rode the train to dusty plains
with me–and slept through shifting tides
along California beaches, we two, strangers
to this land, and no less to each other.
I watched your sleeping breast rise and settle,
like the rhythm of our first freedom days, lazed
into adulthood, we seekers of flame, depths
of our soulful hearts, walking poetry, youth
alluring to each other–comrades–and evil too.
I saw you leave that day, through cloudy eyes,
music, sand and weed drifting us alongside
our own nature, me, cautious and calculating,
ready to loosen within my comfortable shoes, and
you, riddle’s answer to: What is freer than free?
Air.
Who has stolen your breath, my flower?
Sleep.
Your forever frozen face stills time in its place.
Ten Minutes for July 14, 2016.
I remember a couple of Bastille Days in France, one at Versailles with synchronized fireworks to Beethoven and Mozart like I had never delighted in as much before or after. I recall another one sardine sandwiched among Parisians at Trocadero, crazy packed and loud but joy-mad in celebration. And then there was today….
My heart breaks when the world’s horror intrudes. Another mass killing by a mad murderer. And we just live with the inevitability. Will they ever stop if we just continue as we do, seeking the perpetrators, the sources of the infection, wait their lunatic lords out and then strike them dead? We do get to them eventually, but a handful at a time when they scatter the planet like vermin. Yes, they live insanely, with lust for blood and hate, and perhaps we (the rest of the sane planet in habitants) have given them reason and perhaps not. They may just be walking under the zealot umbrella disguised as faithful when they simply lust for power, blood, self-expansion in the sickness of pure cold emptiness and disconnection so vast that nothing short of annihilation can make them feel anything.
Compassion for soulless killers grates at me. I want to feel it. There must be a way to forgive them their sick hearts, but I have not found it yet. I still wish they had never come to be in this lifetime. I wish they had been killed before they killed. And I cannot deny that.
No solace anywhere, not for victims or murderers. Grieve hard all of us, as we slip past the rifle scope.
Image: Wikipedia/Bastille Day
Standing in line, wondering if it’s my time, if I’m next.
Horror dominates the mood of this meet-market place.
How many times have I walked hand in hand with her
strolling in the night along busy streets, on the beach,
arm and arm, not a care what the world around us was?
She once asked me if I were afraid. “Of what?” I asked
then genuinely confused at the context of her asking.
She knew because she was no Johnny Cum Lately like
she found me, days when I thought we were so free to
love anyone, our choice, our lives, nobody’s business.
That was then, before the killing, so now I understand
her hesitance, reticent PDA despite her overwhelming
urgency to touch me, keep me close and hold my hand.
Now I know how much I never knew what it was like to
clasp your hand to the back of your neck to smother it,
the burning, piercing glances and hateful lookaways
and disgust, unknown to me, a judging by appearance,
though I never hid my femme, wore it loudly just like I
wear that tremor of hateful contempt-tossed-at-me-
cringe once someone knows my tribe, the most stead-
fastly, longest-standing hated people in all the world.
But since I did not reveal it in my skin nor my love life,
I was freer than those targets who had no choice but to
be who they were, but to love who they loved and to be
fluid bodies delighting, sensating and breathing light
by which we all create our mad comedies and tragedies
called our civilized, social, contractual, consensual lives.
Believing I was anyone’s everyone, I was simply wrong.
I’m noone’s; I’m in between everyone–not any where,
watching the others duck and dodge bigots and bullets.
At Venice Beach, I met the strolling acoustic guitar players, Steve Gibson and his accompaniment Kenny, who called sneakers tenny runners. They sang Dead songs and other tunes I knew, mostly soft folk songs I enjoyed while stoned, The Beatles’ Norwegian Wood and Loggins and Messina baby songs. I followed those two every weekend and ended up naked with Steve on some grass strip embankment edging a public park. Steve, blonde haired curly lead, was the heart throb, but my fondest memory of the two belongs to Tennyrunner Kenny. I somehow found myself in a bathtub naked with Kenny, the shorter, straight haired less confident but sweeter one. He was always high on whites and shaking a bit, shaky handed, but we had the most pleasant bath, I remember, giggling and playing footsie. So sweet and filled with I-don’t-dare-but-I-really-want-to tension teasing the vaporous heat emitted from the bath water. Those two moved on pretty quickly in my life and memory.
And then there was the day I met Heather on the beach and smoked a joint with Heads she had just met. I showed up late to the gathering and did not know anyone. The joint I learned too late was laced with Angel Dust, and I recall liking neither the lack of warning nor the distortion it produced, as if I were seeing through the wrong end of binoculars. The warped vision disturbed me; I had a hard time maintaining my composure. That may have been the last time I saw Heather. She disappeared. Presumed dead. Thirty-eight years later theories still circulate about murder, escape, serial killers and marriage.
In the gaze of the other 