150 Words: All That Jazz

Maybe it was the wine. 

He didn’t drink much and a little wine went right to his head.  Whatever it was he was humming songs and shedding soft, self-serving tears, and seeing Technicolor things that touched his weary heart. 

Jessica Lange, shimmering in waves of luminescent white, was smiling patiently, alluringly, inscrutably.  Emmylou Harris, gloriously angelic and thankfully earthbound, was singing sad songs that didn’t make him cry. 

And there was dancing…lots of dancing…and sex and laughter, sweet life and sweet death, lasting truth and lingering lies…visions of the future, the past, and all that jazz.

Maybe it was a dream bleeding into the waking world, mixing the magical and mundane in the fevered imagination of a poor mortal fool.

Maybe it was it just a movie, an artful mix of fiction and reality carefully crafted to stimulate the senses and draw emotion out of playacting.

Maybe it was the wine.

The Way of the World

Sometimes he thought he saw the boundaries of heaven.  Sometimes he thought he knew something about the meaning of life.  Sometimes…well, sometimes, he thought he knew.

But most times he knew that he didn’t really know anything of significance.  But that was okay with him…it was the way of the world after all…the way it was and the way it would ever be…and it really didn’t make him sleep any better or any worse knowing that.

Sometimes he tasted the sweetest wine…on the lips of lovers, on the tiny fingers of guileless babies, in the spray of the mighty ocean crashing against foolish, helpless rocks, in the way the sky felt on his tongue after lingering autumn rains.  And sometimes it made him feel so intoxicated, so utterly free, that he couldn’t imagine anything else could possibly ever taste so wonderful.  Sometimes he tasted the wine…and sometimes he liked to imagine that the wine would flow freely for all of the rest of his days.

But most times he knew that it wouldn’t.  He knew that it just couldn’t.  And that was okay with him…the sweetest things should always be taken in careful moderation lest they lose their honeyed luster and come to seem mundane.  This too, he knew, was the way of the world….the way the world was…the way world had ever been…the way the world would ever be…and it didn’t make him feel any better or any worse about his place in the universe.

And sometimes he thought everybody in the world could feel his secret thoughts, read all of his unwritten words, sing all the songs that he had deliberately forgotten how to sing…sometimes he imagined and sometimes it made him feel naked and exposed.  And sometimes it made him feel special, the guardian of secret knowledge entrusted to him by the knowing universe, the seeming fool who strode the world an unknown, but blessed, shaman and scholar.

But sometimes…most times, in fact…he knew that was hubris too arrogant and too fantastic to be taken very seriously at all.  This bothered him, in his heart of hearts, but as long as it remained true in his dreaming times…and it most certainly did…he was okay with the real truth of the matter.  It was the way of the world after all…the way it absolutely should be no matter how much he might wish it to be otherwise…and so it didn’t really trouble his mind…except in the quiet moments of whispering and wishing that everybody has but nobody admits to.

Sometimes he thought he knew…knew the hidden places…the secret, sacred hearts…the perfectly peaceful vistas and the eternally calm and calming hideaways…all of the gentler, more grace-filled truths of the infinite…sometimes…just sometimes…he thought he knew.

And sometimes he did know.  But most times he knew that he didn’t know much of anything and he was, only a bit reluctantly, okay with that.  It was, after all, the way of the world…the way it was and would ever be…the way it was for him, for everyone he knew, for everyone he had known at one time, for everyone he would never ever know….and it really didn’t play games with heart or make sport of his head.  Well at least not too much…sometimes…at least not too much…

I saw God in the wee hours...

I saw God in the wee hours of a particularly warm spring morning.  He was sitting in the corner of my room watching over me while I had slept.

“Good morning,” God said in my grandfather’s resonant voice.

“Good morning,” I said, sitting up in bed.  “How long have you been there?”

God smiled…inscrutably, of course…and made no reply.  Yeah, I thought, that was a stupid question.

“I know what you’re thinking,” God said as light slowly suffused the room.

“I’m sure you do,” I said, just a bit sarcastically, rising from bed and not realizing in the moment how utterly unselfconscious I was about being naked.

God chuckled…my grandfather’s chuckle.  “Ever the skeptic,” he said warmly.  He looked at me with my father’s mother’s piercing eyes.  “That’s okay, I have always believed in you just the same.”

“Why?”

God cocked his head slightly, his mouth crinkled into Rose’s patiently impatient frown.  Another stupid question, I realized, but I felt no impulse to feel shame about it.

God reached out…with my maternal grandmother’s welcoming grace, with Simon’s strong, gentle arms…and I folded into his embrace.  God smelled like honey and scotch, like chocolate and cigars…God smelled like Papa.  “Of course I do,” God said with Alan’s affectionate, slightly shy grin.  “You’re pretty calm about all this.”

I closed my eyes, my head against God’s chest…his heartbeat sounded like the best song I never heard…his heartbeat sounded like Annie laughing…his heartbeat sounded like Michael singing…his heartbeat sounded like Eli sighing softly…and I smiled contentedly.   “I’m going to wake up soon,” I said, “so why fight the dream?”

God chuckled again…my brother’s happy laugh…and kissed the top of my head.  “As you say, son,” he said.  “I love you just the same.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said, not opening my eyes.  I breathed easily, lingering in God’s embrace as the first rays of the morning sun slipped softly through the open window.

A Spring Day on the Circle

The spring day felt like summer.  Warm Santa Ana winds came rolling in…playful but insistent…off the desert and any lingering clouds fled out to the Pacific.  Under powder blue skies heat spread…insistent but no oppressive…over the city…over the neighborhood…over the Circle.

D, across the street, was the first to leave for the day as usual.  A soft roar into the waning darkness of the morning, taking the red SUV instead of the powerful white truck he most often favors. 

Shy, enigmatic C was next, waving as she passed, her headlights illuminating me fleetingly as I paced the Circle, tea in hand. 

And then the Marine on the corner, coughing and smoking…smoking and coughing…as his truck warmed up for the short jaunt off the mesa down to the sprawling base. 

The sun was rising and the birds were awake and already happily gossiping.  The winds were already gathering and the trees were dancing, their spring foliage singing songs to the new day and to the grace of the infinite.

The Earth turned and met the sun.  I dressed appropriately for the weather…baggy blue shorts, muted red shirt…and proceeded with my previously planned chore of finishing the spring cleaning of the garage while the morning was still relatively cool.  The screened doors and windows open to the gathering, warming breezes, music…Van Morrison, Ray Charles…spread from my stereo in the family room and out through the house and into the garage, and into the street.

A, across the street, climbed into the family’s white SUV, the warm breeze carrying a whiff…vague but insistent…of cigarette smoke around the Circle before taking it off towards the sea…and slipped off into the day.  It occurs to me that I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen A smile.

L, two doors down, leaves next, her red hair shimmering in the morning sun, while her husband J sets to work in their garage before the day becomes too oppressive for such endeavors. 

The reclusive young couple who live in what old-timers on the Circle still call “George and Ginger’s house” go their ways…he in his jeep, she, with the toddler she gave birth to not too long after they moved onto the block, in her gleaming black SUV.

P…fair skinned, porcelain, warily affable…comes over to retrieve the mail she had asked me to collect while she and her older daughter were off spending a few days in Idaho with her younger daughter and the grandchildren.  We made small talk about the weather and she, having taken a day off after her trip, went to tend to her plants and flowers and I went back to work in my garage.

I filled the trash and recycling bins and rolled them out to the street for pickup the next day; I rolled C’s bins out to the street because I do that every week as well.  The garage as done as it was going to be, I closed it up and went to finish an assignment on the computer.  The day was getting warmer and the cats had already staked out territory under ceiling fans of their choosing.

Noontime under the big tree in the front yard, the Santa Ana winds (yeah, that Steely Dan song kept playing in my head and I'm looking over my shoulder for Babylon sisters to be shaking it) really kicking up an impish ruckus, the warmth continued to rise, and the day on the Circle continued to slow down.

Mid-afternoon, D, early to work, early home, is riding around the Circle on a bike he apparently rediscovered in his garage.  The lithe D, who walks in both boyish whimsy and…vague but insistent…melancholy, goes shirtless whenever he can and as he delights in making circles on the Circle, his little gold nipple ring glints in the sun every once in a while casting tiny sparks of light here and there. 

Someone visits J, the wind carrying the pungent aroma of his cigar around the Circle. 

Early evening, the air is still thick and sweaty, doors and windows are still open all around the Circle, soft music (from my house) is gliding on top of the heated air as our part of the world started to slowly move away the mother sun.  I spend sundown in the yard…on my bench…luxuriating in the gathering coolness.

The spring day…the spring evening…felt like summer.  And, they tell me, this “summer” wasn’t ending just yet.

150 Words: He Imagines

He imagines himself a hero.  He imagines himself a victim.  He imagines himself a lover consummate tenderness and empathy.  He imagines himself a martyr…sacrificing himself…bravely enduring terrible pain and grinding humiliation…for people who see, too late, how wonderful he is.

He imagines…he dreams and ruminates…because he is forgetting how to live.

His coward’s mouth finds no words when the object of his lust is nearby…his coward’s heart refuses to soar when the wide blue vista beckons…his coward’s spirit flags when it should stalwart enough to take him into another day on the mother world.

He imagines himself a tortured soul.  He imagines himself a misunderstood visionary.  He imagines himself taken in by grace and kept safe by abiding love and passion.  He imagines himself in a state of true happiness that blooms radiantly with no effort on his part. 

He imagines…he fantasizes and daydreams…because he has forgotten how to live.

One More Book to Read

There will always be one more book to be read.  Always be one more song to be sung and one more dance to be shared in the strong, sheltering arms of somebody who cares.  There’s nothing remarkable about that…and yet it’s one of the most remarkable things about this sweet old world of ours. 

Time and history and memory flow on taking scant heed of our brief turns yet, at the same time, holding our being…our fleeting, eternal being…forever safe even after the energy that was us had found new purchase and the shell that was us has returned to Gaea’s tender embrace.

There will always be one smile to feel.  And there will always be one more tear to be shed and one more passionate whisper to be breathed into the heart and the sheltering soul of somebody who cares, somebody you care about.  There will always be one more kiss…carnal and chaste…one more healing sigh born of passion, sweat, and orgasm.

There will always be one more baby smiling, one more hand to hold, one more mountain to climb, one more nightmare to be overcome, one more dream…however improbable…to reach out for with all of the might in our fragile, indomitable bodies and souls.

The universe flows…as it ever has, as it ever will…and dust goes back to dust, light goes back to light.  And there will always…always…be one more book to read.

Believe (Easter Refrain)

I believe in the light everlasting…in the universe unbounded and ever-changing.  I believe in the glory of music and magic, the power of dreams and imagination, the necessity of tears and heartache, and the redemption of passion and compassion.

I believe in the truth of the moment and the fluidity of the past and the certainty of the sprawling future.  I believe moments are precious…minutes are eternal…days are short…years are quicksilver…I believe that time is the healer, the destroyer, the cradle of human existence. 

I believe in love when my heart seems filled beyond capacity…I believe in love when my heart seems empty beyond despair.  I believe in love…and in hate.  I believe in joy…and in anger.  I believe in justice…and in forgiveness. 

I believe in faith…and wondering.  I believe in the existence of foolish war…and the certainly of reborn peace.  I believe in the divinity of mortality and the humanity of the divine.

I believe that I am God…and you are God…and we are God…and God is all of us living, all of us who have died, all of us who are yet to be born.  I believe that God, however simply or complexly you conceive of that universal balance, is.

I believe that we are fleeting in the ken of the universe.  I believe that we are eternal in the tapestry of the universe.

I believe…in the light everlasting.

I believe…in love and being.

I believe…

Amen.

The Pretender

Nobody seemed to see how sad the Pretender was.  He presumed that nobody really cared…though part of him remained hopefully enough…arrogant enough…to presume that it really wasn’t completely so.

The Pretender, resplendent in blue and black, thought of himself as a hero…a super-hero, in fact….and sometimes…just sometimes…he was just that.

And sometimes…too often for comfort…he was not.  Sometimes he was a charlatan…a deluded charlatan in a silly costume.  And he knew it…though he didn’t always consciously acknowledge that fact.

It was often hard to know when the one…the self-sacrificing hero…left off and the other…the sad, vainglorious charlatan…began.  Most times the Pretender, living a life that wasn’t half as real as he liked to believe it was, didn’t want to know.

The Pretender, wearing a mask that seemingly worked better than he really wanted it to, stayed invisible in plain sight…swooping down to save the day and then disappearing into the shadows lingering long enough to try to hear some of the impassioned cheers he thought his heroism was supposed to give birth to. 

Nobody seemed to know how sad…how lonely and how angry and how defeated…the Pretender was.  But that was okay, most days the Pretender didn’t really know either.  He got up each day, put on his mask and his cape, and, disguised in blue and black, pretended to be part of the world. 

He was who he was.  A hero…even if only in his own mind; a charlatan…even if he only occasionally accepted that fact; he was, in his costume and his too-effective mask, the Pretender.  

Slave

I am a slave…a slave to memory…real and imagined.  

I am a thrall to bittersweet realities that I lived, subtly and overtly rewritten the way memories always are over the course of time, and a fool for the more golden remembrances of things which I know never happened but plaintively wished had.

I am a freeman and a slave just the same…a slave to my passions, as fickle and unfocused as they are so often…a slave to wanting the world…no, that’s not true…a slave to wanting MY world to make better sense…to cast me as the sage…the seeker…the lover…the blissful dreamer…the contented soul that I like to imagine myself to be when the moon is low and my scrupulously erected barriers have begun to crumble a little.

I am a slave to dreams…a slave to sorrow and bitterness…a slave to hope and laughter…a slave to the notion that all lost love was the healing love recognized just a heartbeat after it had vanished into the mist of the ever present past…a slave to recrimination, fair and too often unfair, that lingers long after it should have faded into the ether.

I am a child of fleeting light…a child of abiding shadows that I long ago stopped expecting anyone else to truly understand. 

I am a child…I am a man…a freeman of color living in a cool, sometimes cold gray world…dreaming in a warm, always welcoming world of soft, flowing color…blue and gold, red and green, burnt orange and royal violet…black and white…

I am a freeman.  I am a fool.  I am a dreamer.  I am an illusionist.  I am a master of all I imagine. 

I am a thinker.  I am an idiot.  I am a hero.  I am a coward.  I am special.  I am not special at all.

I am a slave.

Every Morning

Every morning, a little bird…hidden in the pre-dawn shadows of the big tree across the Circle…sings the first song of morning, calling…hopefully, plaintively, unabashedly…until, eventually, a distant, sleepy reply comes.  Until, eventually, more distant, sleepy responses sing out in the cool morning air and the conversation, musical and gossipy, begins in earnest.

Every morning, an old man, bundled against the chill before sunrise, comes down New Salem Street walking his happy little dog.  The old man’s pace is brisk and sure; the little dog, his tail wagging, his head held high, effortless keeps pace.  The old man cuts through the darkness with a tiny white light shining from his cap.

Every morning, the trees sway in the lazy breeze…every morning, the stars seem to fade away as the sun’s first tentative fingers of light turn the indigo horizon to a softer shade of darker blue.  Every morning, one neighbor…holding her robe securely…comes out to see where the newspaper guy has casually tossed her copy of the Union-Tribune that day.

Every morning…every weekday morning…my next door neighbor, walking briskly, gets into her car for the journey to her job.  She smiles shyly (I can’t see her face in the shadows but she always smiles shyly) and offers a soft greeting…”Good morning, Michael”…before she backs out of the driveway and, with a little wave, drives off into her day.

Every morning…every weekday morning…my neighbor directly across the Circle yawns as he clambers into his big white truck, waves and nods in the way men do, and roars off towards his own day; the neighbor next to him does likewise with a black truck that growls even deeper than the first one.

Every morning, life slowly rouses itself on Whitehall Circle…slowly rouses itself all around the city…singing and yawning, waving and smiling shyly…while the softly rising sun, slowly but surely, turns the sky from black towards blue.  Every morning…

150 Words: The Hours

Nicole Kidman is pretending to be Virginia Woolf.  She’s pretending to sink slowly beneath the healing waters of a gently unforgiving stream.  She’s pretending to choose darkness because the light is, all things considered, just a little too much to bear.

Nicole Kidman is sinking…slipping, disguised as Virginia Woolf, away from the sky and down to the bottom of a gently non-judgmental stream. 

I am watching and I am pretending that I do not understand.  I am crying, hot reluctant tears.  I am mocking myself…it’s only a movie. 

Nicole Kidman is sinking below the water. I am pretending that I do not understand. 

Virginia Woolf is slipping down and the hours are passing…the hours are ending but not ending at all.  Nicole Kidman is pretending to be Virginia Woolf.  Ed Harris is falling to eternity.  Meryl Streep is choosing life.

I am crying and pretending that I do not understand. 

Gravity

He often railed against gravity.  He always laughed at the hubris of it afterward but he did it, too often, just the same. 

Gravity weighed him down, kept him from just floating up into the azure sky, and he knew that was gravity’s job…but sometimes…just sometimes…he railed against it just the same.

Gravity held him still while his lovers flew away…but, he was realist enough to realize, that was on him…always on him and his stubborn hubris…and not really on gravity…but it was easier to blame gravity so sometimes…just sometimes…that’s what he did.

Gravity kept him grounded when his heart was ready to burst each time his wife gave birth to one of their children…gravity held him close while he held his wide-eyed, open-hearted daughters and sons close to his heart, while he held his guileless and trusting children up high to the moonlit, starry expansive of the sky and let them know that nothing other than that celestial majesty was greater than who they were, who they would be. 

He often railed against gravity.  And gravity, for its part, gave wing to his heart and gently brought his tears back down to the welcoming, nurturing earth.  He always laughed at the hubris of it…of railing against gravity…but he did it, much too often, just the same.

Late in the Evening

Sometimes…late at night…when the moon was cool and the air was still…I thought I could hear my mother crying…or praying…or singing…or doing all three at once.  And sometimes…just sometimes…I thought I heard her, as the song says, “laughing the way some ladies do…when it’s late in the evening…and the music is seeping through…”

I guess I never forgave my father for not loving my mother the way she needed to be…deserved to be…loved. 

I know I never forgave my brother for being so needful that he drained her energy and tried my patience and never seemed to get enough. 

And I certainly never forgave myself for being resentful for being taken for granted (in my heart I know that I wasn’t but it felt that way so often that the little boy in me didn’t have enough strength to ever truly let it go) or for not being able to give my mother room to find some solace and happiness outside of her care for me and my brother.

And sometimes…late at night…lying in the shadows of my bed down the hall…I thought I could hear my mother crying…or praying…or singing.  I thought I heard her laughing…surrounded by soft ballads and dancing swirls of menthol smoke…the way some ladies do…I thought I heard her dancing to her own song…the private song she indulged when it was late in the evening…and the music was seeping through.

150 Words: Listen

We listen but we do not hear.  It is the way of being human.  It is the way of being separate.  It is the way of the world.

(Don’t ask if you can’t deal with “no”.  Don’t leap if you’re not as prepared to fall as you are prepared to soar.  Don’t expect anybody to know what you yourself are not at all sure of.  Do ask somebody to hear when all they can do is listen.)

We speak but we do not say what we really mean.  It is the way of shadows.  It is the way of precipices.  It is the way of fear of falling.  It is the way of being human.  It is the way of the world.

We listen…sometimes we really listen…but too often we do not hear.  It is the way of being close but forever apart.  It is the way of the world.

The Conversation

He shifted uncomfortably in the chair.  He knew this was coming and yet he still wasn’t ready for it.  He looked up into the eyes of the other one and, finding only wounding compassion and patience, he quickly looked back down.

If you could go back and change anything, what would you change?

Straight to the heart of the matter…he sighed the way he did when he wanted people to think that he was holding the weight of the world on his shoulders and measured his words carefully before allowing them to become his truth in the cool morning air.  “Everything,” he said in a tiny, self-conscious voice.

Everything?

“Well…almost everything…”  He waited for response until he realized that one was not yet forthcoming.  “It feels like every decision I made…every avenue I chose to turn onto…every choice…was wrong.  It would be a…blessing…to be able to go back…to know what I know now and let it inform my life in ways that would make it better…”

You think that would have made a difference?  You think that the person you think you would have been would be a happier person?

He grimaced, hot tears crowding the corners of his eyes.  “God, I hope so.”

What specifically would you change?

The question had so many answers he wasn’t exactly sure where to begin.  He looked up for guidance but all he found was patient attention.  “I would zig when before I zagged,” he said, allowing himself a mirthless laugh.  “I would keep my feet on the ground instead of letting myself drift among so many foolish, unrealistic dreams.  I would apply myself to making life what I needed it to be instead of just passively letting it happen to me.”

The words tumbled out with a will of their own and his breathing got tight but he didn’t stop.  “I would tell my mother I love her every day of my life and tell my father I forgive him even though he probably wouldn’t understand what I was forgiving him for.  I would hold my brother tight and do whatever I needed to do to save him from himself.”

He took a breath and the hot tears seized the moment and rolled down his face.  “I would tell the people I loved that I did and leave those I didn’t love by the side of the road.  I would kiss the people I wanted to but didn’t…and I wouldn’t kiss the ones I shouldn’t have but did.”

He closed his eyes and wiped his face.  “I would really be as strong as I always pretended to be…” He opened his eyes and looked up.  “I wouldn’t be so afraid.”

He sat back, spent, and waited.  The silence danced around them.

You know that it doesn’t work that way.

He laughed again, ruefully but with some mirth this time.  “Yes, sir, I know it doesn’t work that way.”  He felt a strong, warm hand rest on his shoulder.

Most things aren’t good or bad…black or white…they just are…and they are in innumerable shades of gray.  The same is true for your journey, of course.

“That doesn’t make me feel better.”  The other one laughed warmly and leaned over and kissed the man’s cheek.

It will when it’s supposed to. 

Somehow knowing it was time to move on, he stood up.  The other one pointed to one of the many doors in the room and he walked towards it.  He looked back and started to say something…

It will when it’s supposed to.

He nodded.  “Thank you.”  And he opened the door.

150 Words: Shooting Star

So close, so very far away…streaking across the dark sky, coming and going in the same fleeting moment…angels watching over me, angels watching over all of us…reflections of the ever-changing, unfathomably eternal nature of the Universe extant…reflections of the ever-changing, heartbreakingly ephemeral reality of our brief sojourn on this fragile mortal coil…reflections of my brief, bittersweet sojourn on this mortal coil.

The dark sky spreads out, a tapestry of amazing wonder, and I feel a part of it…an incredibly tiny part of it but part of it just the same…and I smile…and I cry…and I sing my songs that no one hears…and I sing my songs that the universe understands. 

And I look up and I whisper hello…and I whisper goodbye…(Bob said it and he got it right…seen a shooting star tonight and I thought of me)…angels watching over us, watching over me…always so close, always so very far away.

Exit 11

He drove his big lazy car slowly down the highway.  He was lost again, of course.  So many avenues to explore and willfully he always chose the ones that lead to dead ends. 

He made a deliberate turn into familiar territory…the winding tunnel of love…trying to go back to find an exit that would lead him to some kind of salvation.  But he kept moving backwards…back to old roads he’d ignored…back to old roads he’d crashed on…backwards as if somehow going back would lead him forward.  Luckily he still had a fair amount of gas in the big car’s tank and a pair of rose colored glasses to illuminate the journey.

The exits were all marked “wrong way, do not attempt to re-enter” and he dutifully kept driving looking for a welcoming one.  He blew rueful kisses at the yellow brick road that splintered off into four or five branches snaking into the greater Los Angeles area.  He sang plaintive tunes down the blue road that shimmered in a mist illuminated by a lone blue star.

He paused at the exit…boarded up with a single white rose taped to its sign…that led to the road that followed the train tracks up the coast to what seemed to be a verdant valley.  He looked longingly at the exits that led to the desert…led to the sea…led to the mesa where he’d fucked up and fouled out, hiding like a scared child, in the unforgiving rubble of love’s lost offerings.

And then there it was…again…his exit.  The one that was always open…the exit that he always wanted to take…always chose to take…despite all of his protestations to the contrary.  He lit a cigar.  He turned up the radio.  He steered the big car out of the tunnel of love…out onto exit 11…and sighed without rancor or even sadness.  He was going home again.

150 Words: Old Ghosts

Old ghosts are coming out for encores…smiling out of the haze at the head of the avenue, waltzing down memory lane saying hello, saying goodbye. 

Old ghosts are dancing to old songs on streets of gold and shadow…streets of carnal longing and chaste nonsense, streets of loss and folly and ever-lingering regret…blowing plaintive kisses to the silent shade in the audience, saying things that people wouldn’t, didn’t say and disappearing back into the swirling haze at the end of the avenue. 

That’s what old ghosts do…that’s what old ghosts are for…waltzing to sad old songs while the shade in the audience remembers a past that never was…blowing tender, plaintive, farewell kisses…saying things they might or, more likely, might not have wanted to say when they weren’t ghosts.

Old ghosts are coming out for encores…old ghosts are beaming radiantly while cradling bouquets of white roses…old ghosts are waltzing down memory lane.

The Gallant Lies of Gentlemen Callers

People assured her that the years continued to be kind to her.  Sometimes she even chose to believe it. 

Her heart, she told herself (and anybody who would listen), was spent…it was done with the bittersweet games of passion and desire.  This too was something she told herself that she believed…but, of course, she knew that to be a lie.

Memory conspired to keep her heart bright with hope and longing despite her cynical feints.  She remembered, with humid affection, the soft lips and rough hands that had thrilled and soothed her in days gone by. 

She remembered, with a dreamer’s abandon, terrifying and thrilling falls into the stormy seas of love, sinking and swimming hand in hand with others sinking into those same roiling, calming, mysterious and utterly familiar waters.

She remembered the smiles in heated whispers…the lightning in trembling lips…the gallant lies of gentlemen callers at the door of her hopeful heart.

The years continued to be kind to her…she hadn’t received the last Valentine of her journey…she remembered passion and expected it to return in due course…people assured her…she, more tentatively, assured herself.  Sometimes she, demurely defiant, dared to believe it.

breathing

I feel it breathing.  I feel it…lingering just off the near edge of my perception of the world…lingering just off the near edge of the perception of my world.  I feel it…breathing…yearning…hungering…whispering…whimpering…crying…commanding…dreaming…dancing…being…being…being.

I feel it breathing.  I see it curling…black and blue and golden smoke…in the bright blue, cold gray, stark black daytime nighttime never-time sky.  I feel it breathing…I feel it calling…I feel it cajoling…I feel it singing…old blues, new country waltzes, rock and roll that makes me sweat, makes me forget…I feel it.  Breathing.

I feel it breathing…a song I pretend I know (I am a singer who can’t sing)…a movie that I feel connected to and detached from (I am an actor that can act too well)…a ballet that I know all of the sacred steps to (I am a dancer who doesn’t feel the music)…a prayer of salvation and serenity I murmur into the ether (I am a sinner who doesn’t believe in…anything…)…I feel it…black and blue and golden smoke in the every-time never-time sky.

I feel it breathing…feel it coming closer…closer…closer…please God closer…I feel it reaching for me…reaching for me, calling for me…I feel it. 

But it stops at my skin.