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

My mind is an unkempt Schnauzer barrelling uncontrollably into a flock of ideas, ideas which mistakenly scream away in flying terror as if I might capture one of them.

I watch from below, not focusing on any individual, just desperate for the whole, painfully unaware that excitable passion tips off the prey.

I’m sure the incessant barking of incorrect word choice doesn’t help my cause either.

So I just sit here, staring up at the heavens where ideas roam home, wishing I could fly, waiting for a fool’s thought to land.

Maybe I should trade my mind in for a cat.

Copyright 2009

We live each day, gliding with or without purpose on unsure wings of limited experience, wafting above difficulties, soaring around barriers, merely missing dead ends, only to alter direction and continue moving.

Our sophisticated brains and primitive spirituality have changed us into angels and we exist somehow as civilized carnivores, forced to perpetually keep in motion in order to survive.

But if the flow of activity, that kinetic self constantly seeking purpose, is the one observed by those outside, then somewhere under the bed lies the sloughed shedding of a subliminal soul.

Predatory memories that once tore at our psyches and gnawed on our egos, have now been tamed and confined to some distant cage, a cage that traps the past and domesticates the feral future.

We sleep somewhere above this confined remembrance, dreaming of our deity as the beast inside is rendered harmless, its aged bones lovely in their slow exposure:

          A dented trumpet, tarnished in the twenty years left untouched

           Comfortable sneakers, naked without laces, banned from the sight of unexpected company

          The long-lost receipt for chicken pot pie, 2% milk, and cough drops – a receipt that once marked the borderline  between the read and unread territories of a forbidden book now so banal the library has discarded its carcass

Who are we anyway?

We pretend to be what we were, lust for what we are not, and agonize over what we actually are.

Does the truth of our existence ever coincide with reality, whether our own or someone else’s?

Will we ever rise to the splendor of the angels we long to emulate, the ones we know exist but refuse to mention?

Some will, some won’t, and some will just spend a lifetime shoving clutter under the bed.

Copyright 2009

She asks me to meet her at a local cafe as she has exciting news.

Of course I will meet her.  I will always meet her.

While my conversations are cheap cheese and crackers, hers are exquisite caviar and aged bourdeaux.

So I sit transfixed, elbows rooted to the table, head propped between palms, watching her delicate ringed fingers contort and swirl in an exotic dance of words.

The choreography of her conversation, each nuance of movement, each seductive shifting shape, requires my complete attention.

And the news?  Who cares.  This hand dance is a visual fascination.

How is it that I, who have so many more concrete words at my command, cannot capture and hold the essence of language, while she, speaking only in symbols, uses each finger as a poet?

I listen as her voice rasps out primitive sound.

I watch as her hands build images of another world.

She speaks to me in a manner no one else can imagine, and I listen in a different way.

But yesterday she broke a finger and now I can’t get beyond the splint or her stutter.

Copyright 2009

She once dispensed carnival kisses for a dollar apiece.

The spark of passion between her lips had boys fighting in line.

Now the creak of the rocker keeps pace with her bones, and old friends shuck hidden memories from the shells of her past.

An unexpected jumpstart can still produce sparks.

Copyright 2009

It is the second Wednesday of the odd month and I am meeting with my library book club to discuss yet another memoir.

This one is a best-seller about a divorced woman who spends a year of her life trotting around the globe in search of comfort, God, and a soulmate.

To discover any one of these things in a lifetime is, in my opinion, nothing short of a miracle.

Somehow I’ve even managed to misplace all three of these things in only five years, nothing less than a disaster.

And a small percentage of my friends have pocketed all three prizes without even venturing outside of a twenty-mile radius.

I struggled with the book.

My fellow readers in the club bask in the book’s meaning, revel in the book’s soul-searching, wonder at the book’s significance.

What is wrong with me?

The writing in this memoir is wrapped like a work of Cristo in words of silk, ribboned with magic, and tagged with passion.

So why can’t I find the present inside?

Wait a minute.

Why do I even need a gift?

I’m sitting here in a warm cafe on a wintry evening, writing this piece, there’s an outside chance that the waiter is my soulmate, and God is waving me over from the next table.

Maybe the March book selection will be less of a mystery.

Copyright 2009