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
What sound does a broken heart make?
Is it the metallic sting of an iron-forged tear detonating on a silken pillowcase?
Is it the hoarse whisper of a once-forgotten name unexpectedly surfacing out of some subconscious voice, slipping past lips before the last syllable can be caught and swallowed?
Is it the echoing footsteps of a lost lover’s walk, paradoxically reverberating louder the further its memory moves away?
Or is it simply the silence of words left unspoken, endearments never murmured?
The long empty soulway of neglected love is a deep void filled with bruised pain.
And in this boundless, barren vacuum, the echo of a broken heart shatters like delicate glass, vibrating the eardrums of masochistic mute lovers.
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
If I could wrap you up in a cashmere embrace, I would hold you close until you found who you are.
I would rock you gently to the rhythms of the lunar tide and whisper your name softly until you became the sound.
My strength and affection would shield the fragile skin of your soul until I myself became weary and lonely.
If I could choose to do so, I would crack your heart open on the anvil of our friendship and forge your essence into the shape of your dreams.
But all of these things you must do for yourself.
I can only stand by and wish on your wings.
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
I stand behind the veil of a tender taboo, watching you, wanting you, knowing that the delicate curtain between us is fragile enough to tear but formidable enough to forbid.
It is not my place to decide which one it will be.
Condemned to stand guarded watch on the sharp edge of life’s desire, I can only pray for a stray word to sanction a way inside.
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
Donna Dakota in Word 