Making a man from a boy

When your son tells you something--listen.
When your son tells you-
about his first girlfriend at the age of eighteen,
he was listening when you told him about high school girls
and saw for himself.
When your son tells you he is in pain, physically-his stomach hurts and his face is contorted in pain-
exactly like yours--listen,
he may need surgery.
When the nurse tells you your newborn baby boy has a hole in his heart, maybe she misheard.
And when his doctors say they can hear a flutter
through (out) life--listen. Every time.
When your son asks you for advice
about relationships, instead of  your ex-husband, you have raised a fine young man.
When your son tells you something by not telling you anything-listen real hard.
When your son tells you something you already know--listen (softly).
You cannot plan
for any of this,
especially the part where
He listens.

“It is easier to build strong children than repair broken men.” 

-Frederick Douglass

Blades of grass

7:23 am Sunday morning and the mockingbird has been through his entire repertoire. The sun has woken and warms up to my back, my hair begins to gently steam still wet and dark, it is thirstily drinking back the yellow and I am alone in bliss-for a moment.
It has been so long, I must remember where I keep this safe...

Not even the fountain bubbles about, the chimes do not add their sway and the leaves simply lay. Even they are subdued in a lazy Sun day where a sweet honey suckle lingering moment like this is sprawled out onto the page and sugar keeps my fingers moving, licking and lapping for language. 

But don't interrupt this frame, the cat is curled on my lap, after heaving a small sigh purrs himself to sleep. My book is propped face down, a finger always in, sticky reader... 

I may bring my face up and take in a peace-a-lone...before my cell phone pipes up, bellies are growling, weed whackers whir and a lawn-mower starts snipping too close to my time...cut too short to say, it can wait for another day...




Photo by Unknown [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

'Til Death do Us part

We need to have a conversation, ok, perhaps this is going to be one sided, but what does that matter? Nobody ever talks directly to you anyway, it’s always about you, or not about you.

They walk around your name as though it carries a spell like Betelgeuse, nobody asks for the spelling out thrice, or once for that matter despite the obviousness, yes, inescapable, unavoidable, palpable, and wholly disregarded, shunned, tabooed and flat out feared. Yes, you’ve done it. For every life that has been given, hard-wired for survival, hard –headed about failure or that falls hard, you take back, pull up, welcome home, regardless of age-gender-or denomination-circum-stance. 

I will tell you something you know, we don’t like change, or when matter changes, yet what matters always changes-but that is a different matter-you are always the same, the final matter, always the last word.

You win. You always win. Maybe loss teaches more than accrual, or at least reminds us what we are looking for.

I thought it was coincidence when I was 20 and all babies in my close proximity knew I was pregnant before I did.  It was not happenstance. Have you ever smelled a baby’s head?

When I hit the middle of my life, my kids stepping into adulthood, my parents’ health on a roller coaster, I saw both ends of me, but I was not afraid. I wanted to talk to you about it.

I have smelt death, we don't speak of it for fear that it is contagious like cologne. 

A man I love dearly is dearly afraid of you. I told him this explicitly-of course he denies this, but naturally he absorbed some of what I said about you. After not seeking a doctor for 20 years he is planning a much-needed surgery in the next month. I sowed the seeds.

My mother fell (again), broke her hip and fractured her (other) wrist, and at 61 and she is pissed off. She has never had to stop and think. 

My step-father has recovered from Leukemia, or is it remission; the revolutionary pill replacing chemotherapy for him was approved by the FDA on my birthday. He said this was lucky.

My ex-husband decided he need not pay for his children anymore. And after I have raised them myself he says, “What’s fair is fair,” and “Get busy living or get busy dying”. At over forty he lives with his grandmother, mother and cousin on the same property, he has never left that tiny nest. Days later after he cut his financial chord his grandmother fell, broke her hip, fractured her ankle and had a small stroke.  At 94. She’s still here, and angry as ever.

Royalty-the Prince-and Bowie-Boom! 

Baby boomers are all exploding, imploding from natural causes they say...Well, there are more celebrities today-that’s why-and still nobody gossips about you. Bigger than the Pope. You’re nothing new-I guess-does Death have a Twitter? I guess discussing you is still taboo.

Instead, let’s talk about what was done, what we did, the past and the passing of time. By passing the time this way, time becomes ours again to manipulate and postulate. Nostalgia is nectar to remember something new(ly), better than was-and is-and is needs was. I was here and in such and such year. It proves our is-ness.

I trust you 

will be on time.

And I hear you knocking, and I am home, I will answer. Invite you in. We can talk…heart to heart.

Tell me why you never explain-yourself-or tell us about where you are from and where you are taking us.  Perhaps if you’d simply explain the part you know- the part that says, the more you sow the more you reap, I won't say a peep.

This thing called life is a loan and not mine to keep, guitars gently weep the notes dictated from your morbid humming, some think it’s beautiful and that is because they’ve read your notes all along, they know the song, a lull to bye, but just forgot the words.

If this is all a game of Hide and Seek to you, suicides and confessions, seconds and hours, chances and misses, I would say peek-a-boo-I am looking at you-and might say-winner takes all. 

Image By Pryse, Gerald Spencer, 1882- [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Savor (sAve-hOur)

The traditional recipe yields just 2 dozen, and with a limited supply of ingredients, one should choose their batches wisely.
A little TLC is mandatory to avoid burning- unlike MSG used for flavor-a watch-full i needed simply, a pinch is un-metric.

∞

Never trust a skinny cook, my grandma's refrigerator magnet warned. Because they do not eat cake, she explained. But we all eat pie, the Humble kind on special occasions.

And you know pie is related to everything; the pyramids, hence the Illuminati...the pie in the sky.

My grandpa used to say, Would you want more desert or dessert? and I still do love my esses. Overlapping and back to back even, if he only knew I made two
-to share with the world.

                                                    ∞

One more

chance, one more day, one last batch, one hour, one slice, one piece carved out of twenty-four,
since there are no more
last words one can say in one day.


Image by By Bananenfalter (Own work) Elgn watch[CC0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Breakfast for dinner

After learning in Rocketry about the advantages and differences between electric versus chemical thrusters,
my mind was brewing a storm. Formulae and solutions, postulations and gyrations, the x factors why...
Later, while cooking dinner, with multiple burners set to High Heat on the gas stove, its hiss and blow,
it sparked an inkling that all was not equivalent.
Not just between the two.
Though I have the knobs set to high, I have no control, I think the left front one is stronger, but the variables and crumbs are too many and minute to compare.
And I stare at the flame(s)-
which cannot exist-in space, an arsonists void.
The not space is not not-space, I see it obviously,
and now the ether is coming back, however inflationary or temporary the flux, my how quickly strings unravel, vulnerable textiles, these things are flammable.
And ropes are stronger but under duress and flame split like light, fray and spray in weaker arrays that travel from an ignition point possibly millions of times away.
That sun we saw today.
A breakthrough.
Sunny side up.
Another event on the horizon.




Image from USAF via Wikipedia (Public Domain) Exoatmospheric Reentry-vehicle Interception System (ERIS) Antimissile Rocket.

Penitentiary pals S.W.A.K.

We've been In(ti)mate(s) for a while now, half through,

you’d think after all this time we'd be better friends.

I know, It’s not easy, accepting one's flaws, accentuating the positive attributes, letting failures and ugliness go out the barred window with the subjective death row sentence, the brutality of mortality!

Learning to like yourself shouldn’t be detention, but feels like incarceration I hazard to guess. We are all pre-loaded with the operational software to love ourselves. It comes out as algorithmic survival, a defense mechanism, calculating but unaware. And even self-destruction is a necessary part of self-love. 

Oh, liking oneself is much more complex, if we are to be completely honest with ourselves. 

I cannot stand looking in the mirror, and do so hopefully only twice a day, like brushing my teeth. In fact, that is when I do it, and neither are pleasurable to me. 

My lips specifically have abandoned me. They were never really there from the first word. I was designed for listening. Unable to wear lipstick, nobody can read my lips. This is my silver lip lining. 

And I am deathly jealous of the red, blood and bright, dark and demure…the quiver, the nibble...mesmerizing lips. 

These luscious sets are second best to the eyes, but one is more confident with lies. And I prefer the naked truth.

I feel pretty when my brain fits just right.

My hands have no fingertips. On some of the fingers anyway. 

I have burnt them off learning how to love with food over the years.

Now I can get away with murder. 

As with a pianist, one would think my hands are precious to me, I look at these often. No, they are not pretty either. I don’t like manicures. My nails are usually short, trim and nude and crude extensions for me. 

Occasionally I will paint them and it makes me like my hands for a bit-until the paint chips-which is instantaneous. As you can guess, painting my nails feels fruitless, like dusting and TV.

These are just the top coats of course, exterior paint. The interior is my sanctuary.

Find your voice. Use your voice. That’s the voice. No, it never sounds the same when it comes out. Do you like your voice? Mine sounds like someone took a vagrant identity and slapped it in my body.  And yet I love when people speak poetry, like French and Italian, it moves me out of body.  A way out of my personal prison of personality, pseudo-sounding reality-purportedly, yet we are all trapped on our islands of I and should be kind to the natives who were there before you decided to ‘arrive’.

Since we are cell mates, I just had to say, I have no intention of biting the hand that feeds me.  

Please pardon me-

I am sorry, 

I am famished, but I still do not like me.  

Image of Miss Kate Heffelfinger, 1917[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Trust the time (saving daylight)

Back some time ago, when my two kids were young and restless, I guess I was also young and restless and a bit resentful of the requisite donation of time, the endless giving of time, my time for others. But I now know those times I gave my time to my children were among the most precious times I have been present for.
Being in the Now of then is still with me, even now. Some of the accuracy of memory has blurred, those times I meant to lose, the times I drank to escape facing time. All the time...

Before my kids were wise enough to have learned not to trust everything I say as truth, they believed in the concept of certainties.
Children need this.
As they say, there are some things that remain certain, like death-which is time, and taxes-which is the burden of money, both are binding.
My son would rely on one clock. The clock on the microwave in the kitchen was like the sun for him, and even then he was a live-life-by-the-(exact)-minute kind of guy, meaning take a shower at 6:48, anything else considered late, he believed he was contributing to the order of things.
One specific night I remember wanting to escape all my obligations in order to drink.
I changed the clock on the microwave, I stole an hour of his life that night so he and my daughter would go to bed and I could be left alone in silence.
He should have learned to never trust the time.
One night, at some time in the future, he will find this out and come to collect an hour of my time, with interest accrued in the past.
I will tell him, these are the good times that never last.
And he will be counting the seconds until he will be left alone in silence, sooner rather than later.
Time flies, they say, but sometimes jumps ahead, like today, when we Spring forward and agree to donate an hour of our time until we Fall back,
into precious memories like these.




Image of painting by Hugó Poll, Sunset (1914), [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Infinity and Eternity (i.e.)

Infinity and Eternity

Conjoined at the lips, a syne of the Times, in synonyms, and hymns, chants and rants, examples and alternates, in lieu of, in-loo-of-in-loove.

Such As:

Infinity-id (not ego) ergo and beyond

(i.e.)

Super-ego is immense, less intense is the boundless continuum of you through ubiquity, perpetually in perpetuity with gratuity for the endless expanse of space, the vastness of immeasurability, like possibility. Infinity stretches is reckless abandon in multitudinous arrays, a myriad of mathematical signs like circles and eights so we can relate in order to create what we think will last for-ever.

∞

Eternity –est (not established or capital) on Eastern Standard Time

(i.e.)

Once in a blue moon occurring into infinitude aglow over the wild blue yonder where kingdom come and afterlife are everlasting aeons, endless ages charted on times line without end, immortal and immune, orbiting the obituaries and scary to see the face of our race never noticing the striking resemblance of Us, reaching the finish line, it’s ray projecting what will come beyond what we can see, the isthmus between now and then when sometimes and anon mingle, mix and blend times blurry end . 

±

Image byYehuda Pen [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons Clock-maker (1914).

You had One Job

Based on the job description
there need to be some schedule changes, the portions are all out of proportion.
We must streamline life's overall efficiency, i.e.
how we are spending our time seems an exercise in futility, blowing over(most peoples)head
in exhaustive fumes like labor and toil makes ones blood boil to look back at one year of cleaning, three years of laundry and eleven, not seven years sentenced to watching others peoples made up fantasies, aka TV, do you see-
how much wasted energy this job entails
Five months of complaining curtails job satisfaction and the distraction of sleeping for twenty-six years not to mention the inaction of traffic for eight more hours-
We must smell more flowers along the way and tell the staff to laugh for more than one-hundred and fifteen days.
Anyways, four and a half days of eating is sufficient, and walking around the world four times seems efficient enough to get a good view, but who knew women would waver for one year over what to wear, who cares?
I dare say this sounds crazy,
I must admit
this profession is not for me
Why
Any way you slice it,
I think I'd rather eat pie.




Image By Kate Greenaway (1846-1901) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.


Fun Pie Flavors:
Cracked

Falling Behind

Behind the door

A rectangle creamy cloth covered pin board crisscrossed with pearl ribbon and shell buttons strewn across convergence points lay fading photos of various sizes.

Behind the door, you see

Not all happy frozen faces and various scenic places. You see a pin stuck in.

Behind the door you see a red pin-

That says ‘I am loved’-it was never yours, but you keep it anyway.

Behind the door, the 9 pictures show 3 of a boy, 2 of a baby girl, a sleeping cat, a couple, a pair

Behind the door,

Two postcards, both with boats act as if they were there, as pictured. They were not. Nor were you.

Behind the door,

A memory board hides of someone’s life as though it were yours collaged with fragments of other particles collided that were made of you and them before annihilating solidly into new matter, put this way, in this structure, pinned in place

Behind the door, Lies

closed. 

You cannot picture it. 

Image of painting by Cornelis Norbertus Gysbrechts (fl. 1660–1683) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

All for me

Nel mezzo de camin-
At forty, which is half
Eighty degrees and not May
Fifty foot faces found me
Titanic and romantic
pom-pom pear blossoms sunny Carolina jessamine,
a poetic play (on words), an artistic triptych (on walls),
library lingering and lofty expectations for the big reveal, an hour to heal-
books, books, books, books,
in the mail every day without fail
around
my birthday
a bright star dies this very day
right before my eyes and I could say
I see and count
all the numerous ways
life loves me back (mostly
only) on my birthdays.




Image by Witold Pruszkowski, 1884 Falling Star, [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

A hermit in the heavenly hills

If I had my choice of two places, here and there,
I would find a small little crevice somewhere in between with a view far removed from all possible social interaction as though no place and everywhere and I could watch over and pretend I know the lines as though vicariously living as any one of those colorful caricatures playing life on the center stage-
If I had an twinge, a pang of sentimentality that one felt lonely for other human beings-
I could entertain nature everywhere, intentionally and extensionally and in every welcome space and every shapely mood, color, flavor, scent, temperature and do nothing but interpret and create, contemplate and disperse, make myself realize what I need to actualize for others out there and expel whatever it is I'm trying to tell infinitely catch and release, spinning my tales wildly with embroidered ideas and a flowing spring of hot creative juices that buzz with light and cool electricity for good conduct and I know it can be done by experience and exertion of will-
wait, isn't that what (a) god did?

No, I am no hermit or prophet, saint or sinner, I do not hide, but openly reside on the outside looking grim-but neither do I hide that I do not derive much pleasure from other pseudo-peopled predicaments and superficial social situations, too long is too much and talk is too small to hear any value worth that heartbeat just wasted on wispy vapid vocalizations, erstwhile, some stimulants are to be stoked and ignited, brightened into clarity by enhancing images of what you wish to be, look closely, don't tell, pleasure is an opportunity for silence and relishing the company of someone who understands your thoughts, only like you...
Reading you like a fairytale book, the ending amoral conjecture to put you back in your proper place, perplexed and planted, rooted in dis-content, too close to others for their own myopia, recycled carbon canary with nary a note to echo a name, such a short trip, there's no time for shame.

Ganesha in Blue (Jeans)

I don't know how many times since then I've said, I Guess I'll wear jeans, again.

To school?! My grandmother would screech. It became part of my vernacular.

A girl of 14 never forgets the first nice thing a boy says to her.
Matt D. told me,
as we passed for Silent Sustained Reading Class
that I looked good in blue jeans.

They were the expensive Guess, I remember,
with the zippers on the outsides of the ankles so rich kids didn't have to peg-huh?

My other grandmother bought them for me. I begged. She couldn't afford to say no to an only child.

The boy, Matt, was nervous and hesitated-more than once-even though I smiled nicely.

All 14-year-old women hate their bodies,
because of betrayal,
because they don't fit
anymore
anywhere
between
in.

Even now, blue jeans fit me to a T.
And I think he was right all along.

And I wonder
what would be the overall outcome, continual consequence, everlasting effect, chain reaction, spin-off-
if one brave honest boy told every shy unsure girl her genius was showing
and it fit her to a T,
that would be nice.




Image By Alanna_Kolette,_Miss_HIN_2009_midriff.jpg: Mark Sebastian from San Jose (Alanna_Kolette,_Miss_HIN_2009_midriff.jpg) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.