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

He is a schizophrenic fur yo-yo at the end of my string, erratically releasing and unexpectedly returning.

There is no rhyme or reason, just pure kinetic motion with no chance for potential.

They say the trick is all in the wrist.

Ha!

There is no trick at all, just the pleasure of the treat.

Only an Einstein would understand.

Copyright 2009

No one wants a god with breasts, some omnipotent mother figure smothering high above, yelling out momisms:

     Eat your vegetables and leave the animals alone.

     Don’t run with weapons.  You’ll shoot your eye out.

     Look at you.  You have cholera.  Go right to bed and I’ll brew you some chicken soup.

     If you’re going to use things on this planet, then all I ask is to put them back where you found them.

     Don’t touch that country.  You don’t know where it’s been.

No.  No one wants a god with breasts.

But today, when I picked up the morning paper, I imagined what it would be like when she came home from the store.

I was actually filled  with love.

So I snuck down to the local church and left a mother’s day card by the sink in the women’s restroom.

I know at some point, if she exists, she’ll show up to wash the sins out of my socks.

Copyright 2009

I sit before the carnival fortune teller and watch as she snuffs her latest cigarette, grinding the smoldering carcass into the sandpit cemetery.

There must be at least twelve tobaccoed souls haunting that ashtray.

She coughs.

How can a soothsayer not predict lung cancer on a pack a day habit?

She coughs again, this gypsy caricature, festooned in fabric and jangling with bangles.

It’s not bronchitis.

She’s just anxious and sending me the signal that she wishes to hand out the rote answers to predictable questions about health, wealth, and amor.

She wants me to hurry up with my questions.

Will I get a promotion?  Where IS my soulmate?  How long before the swelling goes down?

I lean forward, my lips twitching, my mind itching, my eyes locked on to her bored vacant stare.

The five dollar bill scoots across the table and disappears down her bodice.  “Your three questions?”

She wants to move on to the next customer.

The timber of her voice has been pushed down a decibel by the strangulation of nicotine.

I am SO getting my money’s worth now.

Little does she know that she has just encountered the kokepelli of customers.

“Well…”  I drag my absurdity to new heights. 

“What IS the purpose of the platypus?”  Zing!

“Can dogs hear the sound of one master’s hand clapping?”  Bam!

“And,” I offer up a pause so pregnant that it is three weeks past due, “what kind of dance WOULD one thousand angels perform on the head of a pin?” Ta-da!

The fortune teller lights up another cigarette and starts mumbling foreign words coated with heavy consonants as the five dollar bill comes home.

My job here is done.

Some information is best left a mystery.

Copyright 2009