Variations on a Saturday

Crickity Crack // My Apartment

"I will take all this green and put it around you like a cave."

I will take my imagination of your sacred visions and distort them to my liking;

I will appropriate your belongings and plunder you for my gain like the viking that I am. 

I will shake you for your pocket change with promises I could never keep, 

implications lacing these jokes layered deep with tailored meaning.

I will put my head on your knee, your shoulder.
Your back will feel the weight of my hair curling down like tiny boulders rolling
beyond all control to block up these twisting highways of discourse. 

The guard rails are nowhere to be found - I collide into your ground.

Lovi Lovi: Page Two

Magic Shop // St Augustine

Expatriate, you, with notebook pages

wrapping crowded market streets in sketch,

with stones pocketed from the naked waters

of your mother’s country, with chiseled obsidian

from sacrificial altars stretching through millennia,

I would enshroud you in robes of chilly mountain fog

embroidered with the guiding star

from the gold of your sprawling ruins,

the crumbled stones of legacy carved

into your very limbs.

You are a glyph, a message from the ancients,

the bard in sheep’s clothing; a preening parrot

preaching of a primal fear and loathing,

the quiet denial of modern comforts

in exchange for banners of the old guard.

She cries back out for you,

her clutching grasp empty

as you throw yourself, exhausted,

back on the shores of an adopted home,

And she’ll have you back or condemn you

to a life of plaster brick facades,

left only with fading dreams of rhythmic chaos

and a chicken’s heart plucked live

from unflinching claws of magic.

The mountainside breathes its whispers

of spells over adventurous wanderers

and such hearts will never quite be home,

never settled, ready for the inevitable next chapter

of the bound-to-roam.

Every face should be a laughing girl

running after donkey-drawn carts,

every set of arms laden with rambutan

and durian’s enduring potency.

These arms and faces lack- the tequila brings them back.

The tequila brings it back,

the silent thundering of tar-black village night,

pounding blood in ears and numbing lips.

Tequila brings back big cats.

It is you who is the jaguar,

not these cartoon muscle groups in packs

of teal and black running on a line through all their yards.

These cushy blobs of strength know nothing

of breath flavored with lovi lovi and liquor -

they sleep in the sheets of protected royalty

while the jaguar scales branches.

Curl around forgotten monoliths,

sleep free. No predator but Time

or his mistress Misfortune

could rouse a lounging beast-

he does what he wants, his only plea

(more a languorous desiring): to find a spot

specialized for camouflaging the shine

of rippling dots so as to allow recline;

a vantage point to observe the restive milling

of the rest of us, spilling back and forth

to the amusement of twitching whiskers.

Lovi Lovi: Page One

Tensed muscle,

tightened high in pitch like spring

steel striping down to ivory,

spreads out a broad expanse inviting me

to swoop in with solid nurturing.

My fingers play a song of oxytocin

and I pluck you from the music waiver wire,

stringing beads of blessed pheromones

together with exotic jungle wine.

Love me, lovi lovi.

Your soul, more eloquently:

a grape held firm between forefinger and thumb,

gleaming with the sun’s translucence

through glistening green and glowing cool,

a sight of muted opulence,

savored in the second before teeth sink

into delicate flesh and explode a sweet

burst of bitter flavor out to eager taste buds.

Your soul, oh one with light and crisp running in rivers

through the stillness of a sleepy mountain basin,

is the anticipation of barrels corked and left to age,

growing slowly into what they've always been.

I am eyeing the shelf with a mystic’s vision,

sensing the ticking winding down,

wondering what notes we can expect from you.

I am idly running hot,

tracing bands of blackened iron and

split staves of oak with writer’s hands,

coercing your next alterations to the plot.

Fomenting fermentation, as it were-

I merely wish to test the flesh of fruit.

Glistening but deaf // Kingshead British Pub

Apron

My place in line is prefaced by mothers in love with their children, suffixed by young girls in love with their drugs.

Much to my dismay, I’m both of the above – a childless mother and a junkie undercover, a girl with dreams of two worlds converging peacefully.

(I don’t think that will happen for me)

So for now I throw the nurture where I can and instead of a babe with a reminiscent face I cast my love at those with matching souls, making goals with forced ambition and one foot stuck in the kitchen.

The apron strap cuts into my neck, a welcomed weight, a chiseled roadmap to the domesticity of my dreams.

But I’d prefer to dwell on orange and bustled pants –

a bowl cut and a mindfuck closer to the shrinking of centimeters between skins. 

A quiet grin, an outletting of breath before the shedding of mortal coils begins.

I am not your mother or your lover, but I would sweep cool fingers across your heated forehead. 

I was a tree // My apartment

Destino

The lights, the night // 1904 - courtyard stage

 

It’s clear that my identity is materializing

in the sheer air before me. 

My sense of purpose has been found 

in the form of a brightly shimmering will

of the wisp floating in a haze of tantalizing neon,

in the air between flickering poi.

I’m following, sheer will, I’m here

I write these words to verbalize

this binding contract between

my destiny and I.

I know, now, that you are my destino.

Just a 10-letter word

“Bad decisions!” she squealed with delight, sipping emphatically from a tacky concert-venue rumrunner out of an oversized plastic tube. The unnaturally raspberry-red frost-alcohol mixture greeted the humidity of a late August St. Augustine with too much enthusiasm, meeting a melting and leaving beads of dripping condensation.

In this 17-dollar drink she will find salvation, elation in the name of warmth and dancing, hips belonging now to fuzzed out reggae and the joints passed around new strangers. Anyone becomes a friend under red and green stage lights, everyone a reggae fan when the buzz is forming and the weed is flowing.

From the comfort of the comptroller’s chair, objectively her body looks good standing there in the steaming pillars of sudden wafting smoke. The crickets are drowned out easily by the joyful howls of a thousand hippies.

And what fun it is, a gathering, a group of people who don’t know the name of nor her emotional connection to the warm-up band playing. The atmosphere is palpable, intangibly, the shovel to her face ringing in her ears like 15ft high speaker stacks. A man in Henry Rollin’s uniform of black wraps tense fingers around the microphone in rebellion.

A belly, paunched, joins the artist on stage, and her eyes strain to reconcile the writer that for so long fueled the turning of her notebook’s page with this weathered father of three in a Rhymesayers tee.

Age and change, a peaceful range of rage steps in to take the place of youthful angst and anger’s plague.

Whitaker

Underneath flyover at the end of Southside Blvd

How am I supposed to unpack my brain

When there are new terrains of stubble

To stumble through?

Foreheads speck with glistening confetti,

A reward for work's unairconditioned quirks

Inside the bubbling of a can's Tecate.

How do you know the things you know?

How did tongs and flame find your tattooed frame?

How did you find yourself in a band

Of tank tops and gloved hands,

A member of the culinary punk brigand?

I imagine the same way the apron strings found me-