A short prose piece was published on Life in 10 minutes here. It feels good to be writing something other than sales tickets, school papers and grocery lists. Please enjoy.
Peace
Happy New Year Love: Painting Trees Passion
December 31, 2016
“Write for one reader.” I heard that in a movie. Have a face, a personality, a height, even, but only one, so you can craft your story with a voice directed to someone with a voice too, in a conversation about what you two shared–or never shared.
So here goes:
I couldn’t write about a pure love. There have been many loves. All special loves. I think he insisted I watch this movie (plugged in the headphones, handed them to me, and loaded the movie to the rectangular screen inserted into the back of the seat in front of me) because there are loves that beam a hole in your brain and others in your heart. There is love of the right thing, doing the right thing, even if it is wrong for a part of you, wrong for some wild, abandoned adventure that you’ll never take. The purity lies in never going there. That love is an idea.
Ideas are clean, laser light, perfect, not messy like hunger, sex or anguish. Love as idea. Those abandoned are the purest because they are never lived. Those less glamorous, the responsible kind, the right kind, have their own line of righteous good, a purity of sorts, but not like a diamond (more a ruby). Those are reserved for the love so sublime but impossible.
If I write to you, will you understand? I think we both know how cut-painful words read starkly on a page. But it will bleed us pure. And that’s what you mean when you say you’ll love me to the day you die, visions that will run through your great fantasy-loving, movie mind when you’re rocking grey-silent inside, peering absently through a dirty window obscuring the winter dance of dusk-lit, flaming trees.
And it’s sacred and raw because it’s not messy, not calloused in boredom, sadness, anger, irritation and hate. Fragile love with a tough hide. We carry each other in a deeper pocket. I know you believe. I believe too.
The question never answered, I believe that too. Suspension, free floating purity, I can’t write that.
Heritage Now
With fever and chills, my father lies in a hospital bed and
fights invaders ransacking his cells while we, her dad and I,
Share ancestral history over wine and braised Brussels sprouts.
Her father pulls out an album of black and whites painting shades,
Faces that look like his and hers, she who hungrily leafs through
Her fore-figures shepherding precious genetic messages, DNA,
Carried on lines like cargo bins rolling down mining tracks,
Straight to the mountain’s core, our heart’s beating back minutes
Through rock and river, rice paddies and leper camps, continents
And decades all swum, waded through generations of race, religion,
Geography and cultural diaspora, lost at sea; my people roamed.
I tell her we were gypsies and exiles, imperialists and colonizers,
Journalists and piano-tuners, soldiers and artists, musicians
And doctors, lawyers, painters and prisoners; we sailed on ships.
She eats the images page after page flying and flashing ghosts
In pressing drive, primal ranging expansive lust for connection,
An answer to why she is, these cellular haunts flooding her veins.
She wants to know the stories that she belongs to, her threaded
Braide-links to French, Spanish, Vietnamese, Rumanian, Russian, Latvian
and German world walkers. She doesn’t know yet, which link connects them all,
all the grandfather’s fathers and their fathers’ fathers before.
She doesn’t know the whole story and she can never know.
Spiritualism
A water-bearing poet floats visions, senses voice and intuits vibration, but feels only the air of separation, abandonment and rejection. He drags his sullied heart behind him; tethered to his ankle, the throbbing muscle struggles like a cat on a leash, he sometimes studying it like the ocean in distant admiration but fearful of submersion. His pen inks the air blue.
An earthen essayist eats hollow olives for iron strength, the muddiness of her thoughts offset by the rootedness of her haunches and firm stand, feet imprinting her path. She throws tentative velvet brown stares, intending intimacy but coming up comfortable in a circle of cool, relaxed open-eyed, open-legged hug-slump of a girl.
They too can dance the breezy corridors between song and whisper, drumbeat and blood–a waltz of wonder. The wind of voices blows warmly.
The Joy Girl
A petulant smile, upper lip quiver,
never-ending streams of jubilant free
pours the honeyed golden, emerald eyes
smoked in calm to hide the sparkle speaks,
“I want…take me…so much to give…but I fear,”
all in fragility, fresh and tainted only at the fringes,
circling the crystal center yet to form whole, complete,
she deftly ball-toes the river logs spinning a strange land.
In the gaze of the other 