The packing bxes arrived late Friday evening so I spent the weekend putting my emotional life into storage.

There was a twenty-four hour storm watch in effect for the area and for me personally.

This was as good a time as any to put the past into pigeonholed perspective.

I put on a depressing radio station.

Bach was pacing heavily around the airwaves in his hobnail Baroque boots while the thunder of the downpour agitated his legacy.

Nothing sends me running down into the spiritual cellar like a brooding German composer and an electrically-charged atmosphere.

Everything was perfect – but where to start?

When in doubt, always opt for youthful memories.

There’s always a bunch of them laying around the basement, all unorganized and mildewed.

I gathered up armloads of the stuff and dragged them upstairs.

I’ve been hauling bits and pieces of my youth with me forever.

They have such strong emotional ties, sort of like pictures of relatives you don’t know anymore but you still can’t toss away.

So there I was, cramming piles of reminiscent youth into the biggest box I could find.

I had to sit on the lid while strapping packing tape around the cover, but it’s all put away now.

I highly recommend misspending your youth as foolishly as possible so you don’t have so much left over…you won’t know where to put it all.

Copyright 2009

The sound of my key in the door causes reality to inject a small dose of cause and effect into his miniscule mind.

That is why he sits in silence, hunched under the table, holding firm to the concept that by doing so he is invisible.

Does he truly believe that by remaining motionless his gray fur acts as camouflage on the red oriental rug?

How did he tightrope across Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest?

Doesn’t he realize that the complete silence makes the absence of his ear-piercing yelps, clattering tags, and flamboyant Schnauzer-on-a-pogostick greeting dance all the more noticeable – and cause for suspicion?

My crime scene skills, gleaned from thousands of award-winning televison shows, kick in.

Bits of chewed magenta candle litter the linoleum in front of the refrigerator.

“Who did this?” I ask in that pet owner voice that comes complimentary with every first leash.

And then he does it, his own personal answer to authoritarian challenge.

He jumps to his feet, cocks his head, and quietly woofs at me in complete canine defiance.

I offer you the translation:

   Wasn’t me.  It was Colonel Mustard, in the kitchen, with the candlestick.

Game.

Copyright 2009

The last time I saw, truly saw, with my heart and not my eyes, I was nine years old and held prisoner in parochial school.

I was at the age where one instinctively knows that certain moments in life should be plucked and placed into storage.

One needs such memories for comfort or revenge.

So there I was, a reluctant prisoner of education in Sister Juanita’s fourth grade classroom, sitting in the back row with the end of the alphabet, writing another insipid essay about mortal sin and the fires of hell.

That’s when I decided that I’d rather go fishing.

Mind you now, I was an urban child with neither pole nor lake.

But I was armed with a malnourished imagination, a case of ill-fitting conformity, and a lunchbox full of cookies and metaphors.

I was desperate to escape…if only in my mind.

I opened the student dictionary, set my sights on a spectacular adjective, and pinned one down on my paper.

It was exhilirating – the thrill of the hunt and the catch.

I had gone deep-sea fishing with a fountain pen while the rest of my peers were hooking sunnies with pencils from on shore.

A pile of carp pales in comparison to a barracuda.

I can still sense the excitement of that first haul, impressive really for an amateur angler.

The trapped word wiggled with life beneath the nib of my pen but I held fast.

The adjective and I were one in the struggle – and I, yes I, emerged the victor.

The flow of filler black ink made the mounting effortless.

My catch was multi-syllabic, melodious, and magnificent.

I taxidermied it in perfect Palmer penmanship.

Even Sister Juanita was impressed.

I was at the top of a new game.

It wasn’t until three days later, when my triumph was posted on the refrigerator door with a funeral home magnet, that I was forced to face reality cold in the face.

My piscine prize, my majestic modifier, my astonishing adjective, had mummified into a mere ordinary word.

Life had dehydrated out of its resplendent body with use and the passage of time.

What was once monumental was now merely mundane.

That’s when I saw, truly saw, with my heart and not my eyes, that I was the one ironically hooked.

The sport of words lies in the hunt, not the haul…and the life of a writer is continually measured by the ones that get away.

Copyright 2009

My spirit whispers your name and your eager baby fist grabs each sweetly-curved vowel and long-stemmed consonant.

I have presented you with a bouquet of identity and over time you have woven its fragile bits into the crown of a conqueror.

How is it that I, who loves you with a heart more powerful than any god’s, now finds that same heart shattered by your absence?

Reach inside the broken rubble of my soul and place your finger on the heartbeat we once shared.

Can you still feel its rhythm?

Can you still move to its music?

The connection between us pulsates beyond the very existence of time.

It is an endless echo that speaks in infinite motion…perhaps that is why you so passionately dance in the moment.

Your heartbeat will now carry me as mine once did yours.

I am the past and you are my future.

Copyright 2009

Ranga.

The word “orangutan” is gargled in the throats of the Maori, masticated in the mouths of the Bushmen, and expectorated by colonists in the streets of Sydney until it morphs into the idiom for “redhead.”

You are the ferocious ranga in my life.

Sitting across the table from me at the coffee house, with your fiery hair lit up like some personal bonfire, you cause me to lose focus on the conversation.

Today your coiffure is upswept and angry, spewing out amber tendrils like some ignited Medusa.

I can only throw blankets of smothering words over your fireballs of tension.

How is it that you can sit there so calmly, as if everything is normal, while your hair spontaneously combusts?

I feel like Dante caught up in my own little inferno.

Then, rather unexpectedly, the flames dramatically dissipate into pathetic ringlets of evaporating smoke.

You twist the glowing ashes into a conservative bun and narrow your eyes at me as if to ask:  “Are you listening to me?”

There is no winning with a Ranga.

Copyright 2009

She struts her stuff on the rim of the margarita glass, high kicking salt up over her beehive.

Her hair glistens like Christmas rock salt.

How can she balance like that in those three-inch cocktail shoes spiked with cherries, explosive in that exaggerated jazz style, all staccato and rum.

There could be a fight.

This is way too much passion and energy for me after a hard day of work.

Could I just have a paper umbrella, please?

Copyright 2009

Coyote claims she is independent and feral, free of gravity, fashion, and all forms of punctuation.

Yet she constantly nurtures a period and adores her red boots.

She hands me a purse made out of a frog and a twenty dollar bill to buy a black dress, always treating me better than I ever treat myself.

We sit without touching on the “El” to the airport – together in a seat, apart in our futures.

She makes eye contact with a demented street preacher, but I pay the price for smacking an arm.

Eye contact is Coyote’s sole purpose in life now, while slipping by unnoticed seems to be mine.

I am Slick and she is Coyote.

I listen as her boots fade away in a samba, a bittersweet echo of friendship and farewell.

No road trip is ever complete without the conundrum of Coyote.

Now she is home while I struggle in my city of strange urban dreams, this blue-collar oasis of magic and charm.

My heart is here but my life lies elsewhere.

Tonight I will shower in the meteors of Pleiades, while I howl apostrophes up at the void.

Tonight I will dance in two different sneakers, trying to make eye contact with the face of the moon.

Where is Coyote to help me erase  life’s question mark?

Copyright 2009