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
It was water that brought them together, though neither one could swim.
The young one envied frogs, marveled at their ability to absorb liquid through the skin, fixated on the dual nature of their cycle.
Yet there was an underlying uneasiness with their lives, one that caused her throat to constrict and her lungs to tighten.
This heavy feeling of water repelled yet fascinated her.
Perhaps it was the leftover imagery of what had once tried to reclaim her, perhaps it was the innate understanding that this element held life’s secret core, perhaps it was her bond with the older one.
The older one, who feared water with the same intensity that others fear death, now began to reach out to the element that suffocated her subsconscious for so long.
She remembered the miracle of life as the younger one hung suspended in a cave of water before bursting forth with a cry of elation and shock, her entrance into the world heralded with the applause of water.
The older one’s fingers instinctively smoothed over the folds of her aged abdomen where the younger one once waited with her.
Two were one so long ago.
Now the water called, beckoning one closer, holding the other at bay.
While the liquid of the earth might warrant trepidation, the water of the soul commands only love.
They smiled, each for the other.
What joined them now would one day seperate them – but the tides remained, eternal and perfect, as the moon this very night.
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
He is a spirit man, inhaling reality, exhaling dreams, holding his medicine close to his heart…but his charm oozes through his pores with the slightest exertion.
A magnet of magic, he attracts and repels, unaware of his power.
People lean in to his words, bathed gently in the sweet balm of his breath.
And why not?
He makes them feel the impossible is right there with them.
He soothes their psyches and excites their fingertips.
Dreams have more energy than the atomic bomb if properly detonated. He tells me this.
He speaks to me in words dripping with poetry.
He dances instead of walks.
His hair is electric.
But I, like the others, buy deodorant for his charisma and insulating gel for his curls.
Too much of a good thing can kill you.
Copyright 2009
Every day on my way into work I pass by a sign that encourages me to “Adopt A Highway.”
I consider it.
My children are grown, my dog is well-behaved; maybe I need a neglected stretch of macadam to make my life complete.
But then I think of the hours of selfless nurturing: the nights of wondering who’s driving the curving paved stretches, will there be an accident, are the double yellow lines neat and legible, not to mention the constant nagging about litter and roadkill.
In this society, appearance is everything.
It would be fun, though, to speculate on a bit of thoroughfare that belongs totally to me.
Would it one day become an impressive interstate or maybe a tollway that could then, in turn, take care of me in my old age?
I glance at the void metal backside of the sign in my rearview mirror.
No. I am now too irresponsible and tired to adopt a highway.
Copyright 2009
What if Romeo hadn’t crashed the Capulet ball, hadn’t crossed stars with ingenue Juliet, hadn’t tossed his heart up to a balcony in Capua?
And what if Juliet had smacked down that tentative tender heart, had capitulated to the withered logic of parents, politics, and polite society, had covered her ears to the sweet sound of angels singing: “This is the one, this is the one”?
The world would still have spun on its axis. The tragedy of a romance would still have occurred.
The Capulets and Montagues would still have spit out each other’s family name and stomped on its heritage.
But the major question still remains: what would have become of the celebrated young lovers themselves, this being a tragedy even greater than the Bard could tell.
Romeo would have eventually married a much younger woman from a most proper family.
His tights would have grown snug from good food and drink, while his spirit would have settled comfortably into the blue armchair of aristocracy.
He would have grown bald, apathetic, and unaware. No lightning bolt of love would ever have struck his spine and electrified his soul until the hairs stood up on the back of his neck.
He would have slipped through life unconscious of his own power and magic.
The same for Juliet.
She would have pleased her family, negated herself, and agreed to marry an older man of wealth and power.
Her beauty would have coalesced into a mask while the light of possibility dimmed slowly from her eyes until the vacant stare made her even more alluring.
The sweet breath of her children would become the only tether holding her to earth, preventing her spirit from drying to dust and disappearing on a kiss.
Oh how the choices of one or the other could have turned this romantic tragedy into a tragic romance.
Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?
Leave thy wife and return to sweet Juliet.
Copyright 2009
I breathe you in, sweet as the scent of moonlight, easy as the effort of autumn.
I breathe you out, difficult as a dying wish, uncertain as the promise of hereafter.
Copyright 2009
Why didn’t the turtle feel the need to evolve?
Was it lazy? Maybe bored? Did it believe it had a good thing going and didn’t need to improve?
I don’t think so.
I have a theory that the turtle understands the concept of the circle the way Buddha gets down on zen.
Everything in life marches around back to where it started. It’s the first law of nonsense.
So when the hands of the evolutionary clock hit high Cretaceous, the turtle merely tucked tail, content to ride out the storm of adaptation within the safety of its shell.
Let the rest of life run amock – growing hair, warming blood, filling up nature’s vacuum with mammalian lint.
The turtle would maintain its spot on the bargain shelf of life.
Simplicity can sometimes be the key to survival.
Copyright 2009
Who knew that I would be in a relationship with a pyromaniac?
Yet here you come, home from your day, shoes smoldering, ashes in your hair, eyes ablaze.
And all I can do is offer you a cold beer and an extinguisher.
Copyright 2009
Donna Dakota in Word 