madame periwinkle's quest of (not for) solitude

Sand beneath me, crunching like nails across a chalkboard
Something tickling my feet
                       can’t be the waves because they’re ten-thousand miles down
my body  
         as small as a grain of sand.
Floating
Rolling
             on a bed of waves
Feel like it’s an amusement park that stretches down the continental slope
trickling down and down to the realigning crystals.
         Volcanic bubbles creating the land for us to wash away.
And somehow
             the thought of erosion being a part of the cycle seems like a new and logical idea
                   in this world where everyone’s trying to feel a part.
                                                                              And play one too.
The world’s stage is too small for some characters,
The ones you complain are side stepping.
                         Watch out!
There might be a ghost in a blue dress dancing on the gates
But I guess it’s better than a devil
             praying that you will be the teenage faust.
And what would you sell your soul for?
a Jimi Hendrix album?
a pair of glass slippers?
maybe even a purple people eater,
          Because everyone’s got a dream.
          Does yours start with a beat?
          When you’re tapping your feet
        does your heart feel light enough to fly
   out of the window
   tumbling through canyons in a Dali painting.
And when the world gets too bright,
   do you have to put on your rose colored glasses
   just to dull your senses?
We all have days like that.
The ones where the Mad Hatter glows purple
   and the back door seems a lot safer than the stairway
                             the one that never leads to heaven
But you can fly,
So who cares about all the fields of sunflowers
     you only wanted the seed
     Couldn’t take the time to nuzzle one of the yellow petals.
     Couldn’t take the time to notice where the word sun comes from.
The yellow that’s in her eyes,
When she looks good enough to curl up in on a cool spring day
      Just like the blacksnake that finds the warm spot on the pavement.
           Where did you put your fangs?
But here I am now, far out on the shores of summer
out of even your rattler’s reach
feeling like a blacksnake myself
the sun stimulating my skin, until I can feel the melanin shouting to get out.
       It just wants some attention.
Only, please not from the eyes like a frightened bourgeoisie
           storming the Bastille
           only this time asking for shelter.
But are we insane to wonder
    if it’s safer on the inside.
          And I’m busy screaming:   
             come protect me from the outside world
             because that’s enough to make me dangerous.
Bouncing hydrogen atoms waiting to be ignited
And you offer to light my cigarette.
               I tell you, kind sir,
               Just wrap me up in a book.
               The words should keep me warm and the pages should keep me occupied.
                     And then I won’t blow up.
I’ll slither along over she seashells waiting for another day
     wishing for sharks teeth, mother of pearl, and physics books written by poets.

the epic journey of madame periwinkle and her band of pirates

 
Part I.  
As I lie on the sand, I am a conductor as the ocean orchestra rises around me. 
I hear a mother scold her child, blending into the scooping birds and crashing waves--
a railroad car hurtling down the shoreline, meeting at my toes.
I can count the waves coming in…
   one
        two
             three
                    Four dolphins surfacing, breaking the liquid mirror of the sun.
As far as I can see: sky glazed with white,
heavy in places from a brush too thick with paint. 
Towering cloud giants-- guardians of sensitive human skin crisp on my back
like the outside crust of a hot pocket.  I’m all gooey inside.
What mist is rising! as seagulls soar beside flying discs, their shadows shading my body.
     a tiny boy in shorts too big pursues the bird, no matter how hopeless the chase.
                           I guess girls and birds aren’t so different.
A pelican floating lazily on the water-- that’s where I’d like to be--
numb ears up to the challenge.
Poor gull-- all bruised on one side-- flapping still, crippled, leaning--
nothing to stop the oncoming wave from taking her over,
                  pressing her down to the bottom with the broken seashells.
Five stuffed-hen sisters stroll down the beach smiling-- sixty and shoeless must feel nice.
their spidery mist veins dabbling, floating on the surface of the water.
A semicircle of grass, expanding like a pupil, sneaks in through a hole in my straw hat.
 
Part II.  
He pulled a bandana out of his
      mouth
   his crispy, pitchy pout
         a painted picture--
                        painted, purchased Picasso on the wall
                                                tipsy white watch fall
                                                                                    off the free white woven way
                                                                        back this way
                                                            way back to the
                                    O    P    E    N    way…
                        brain smaller     mystery mound
                 sound on the down grades of a shrinking page
            growing larger now
                   like a highway novel--
                      light beams breaking
 
Flip with the drip, drip sandy throat-- crusty, crumbly
unfound.
All over again like a new learning
into the dentist’s laughing gassed
    that subpass down into the
    freezing mass of the oh no fading sunlight.
Crazy blues and yellows
    of the friendly fellows-- cellos dancing
         in the grass like a backwards
writing.
      A Chinese champion could have passed.
                          Past?  Alas!
Like a Maxways outing
        prattling to the boat
squinting like a cowlick took to sticking on the blonde-eyed young hare
squinting and pulling the webs back down there
sailing like a pale queen,
yellow cartoon strands of some little girl’s hair
         Flutter as I stare
champagne surfer boy physique
on bottom
country boy smile
     full all the while
          balancing it out on top.
Kerplop!  Raindrop-- we dockside pilgrims must go.
 
“Pink Panther Padua sun”
            (British accent)   “and the brilliant pear burst”
(telltale story
                      again)  “drunk and driving (through” the nasally negligent accent) 
“just burnt off and swallowed” (through the silvery sunset)
            “strapping good,   (really”)?
His Shakespeare-bashing curly brown hair--on the driveway
            telling tales with words
      not written
         or heard on the black-topped highway
words blanketed with blackballed silk
swaying through the letters.
American shirt beauty rising
      like Fender guitar riffs from the grunge days basement.
 
When you’re really mixed up--
marshmallows taste just like every other puff-painted part of the season
yellow corseted cheerleaders
hang down from the tailpipes of some other cat’s Mustang
       as the cops pull up
         with long greasy hair
     would A Clockwork Orange look any different?
melted bloody battlefield of over-slaughtered states
corporal compost pipes
   perched on couches like vulture demons
        each time we were failing to fly over a braless brain of trash
the mass of three preteen boys
     with a maleficent magnet rope
            igniting around his neck in gold
   think you’re doing magic
   think you’re producing water
like water pouring out on the page
        dewy dashes mixed with the Marley matches buzzing in the shade
                 magic milk-making procedure
                 in place with an eraser button
                 full of flakes dripping wet
                 of paraparetic wrecks
        crazy writing, lip biting tools in the rain
        losing train of thought as they stare out.
                 thought and thought on two planes
                 nouns and verbs can’t be the same
                 yet wrought with iron spelling
                       thinking is different.
writing redefined
        stories of picture perfect people
             (missing states of minds)
        ridiculous red strains of fire
raring out of the ground on her head
           scary music making the pain stand up
                her heart, screaming
                gotta stop so I can go!
“Did you see anything?”
                                        “The back of my eyelids.”
 
Part III.  
The tiny lion's paws crawled
     down the stairs to the shoreline
Against the roaring breeze covering
feet in sand.
            Twin redwoods towering with
     Neapolitan ice cream skin.
Fishing pole tugs at my pen every time
   I try to lie down.

all the glow without the shine

Have you ever been sitting still long enough for your entire life to well up in swells around you, rocking you back and forth, lulling you to sleep with the sound of every love that ever held comfort? I have been there today-- to the place where the rainbow starts producing sugared gum drops, the candy sliding down the arc onto the other side of the world. It's realizing that light reflecting from his eyes is actually coming from you. Some mornings, life wakes us up to flip us onto our backs and leave our legs fumbling for ground, and others we are awoken simply so we can be reminded of what it was like to sleep. Yet no matter the reason, there is no getting around the fact that until you let it disappear, hope returns every morning to give you another chance. And greater than hope-- love, and luck, glamour and self-tanners. Now, wrapped up into a pill we could make a million dollars, but I am much more fond of the hair flip...wait...look...just there. And that was worth the loss to wait for.

It's moments like those when the sun catches the undercurrent of her curls that I am reminded why I find life always stalking me. Each moment holds for me the beauty of the one before, and the moments highlighted with friends and flings are like snapshot images of emotion, brought back by the location of the proper three-ring divider. I hear the first straining notes of a former love song, and I'm in a 15-year-old's body again, staring at a red jeep and wondering how, when I was that age, I could have thought that that the world would always be described by one soundtrack.

Or how when I was 16 I thought that the only love I needed could be shown on one hand and in capital letters, and when that failed, I searched through Ginsburg's psalms, and still found only the eyes of a forlorn lover scribbled down on a purple sticky note a year later.

Or 17 and scared. How I could lie in one place so long when the entire world was crashing down and soaring away again? Of course, it was all in the illusion of a jet airplane, but I still wished for it not to crash. But crash it did, taking out the greater Chicago fleet. If they could have felt my heart stop beating every time they jostled the baggage, maybe they wouldn't have overloaded the planes. Lying in their watery graves, I'm sure they're thinking about the same flimsy paperback book I read every year since fifth grade. Rehasing the part about the berries, or was it bark?

At 18, I was some sort of chicken. Not to be stuffed or plucked. A chicken to set in the middle of the lake with several swans, led to believe that I am a Canadian goose. It isn't until after I miss the flying V that I realize how hopeless a case with crutches is. Yet after treading on, I wonder if I've started to hear things, drunken comments whispered just before bed and forgotten in the morning. I had kept them waiting for two years, yet I only waited long enough to establish my post before backing out through the bars.

But finally, at 19, I'm a figure sketched into the sand, a piper tied to her rat pack, and a mile marker along the way lit by tradition. I'm the heavy eyelids that droop off from exhaustion and from knowing what happens when I wake up tomorrow.

I will still be riding in these waves. Waiting for my shooting start to shortly arrive. Thinking up the best wish and floating with it in the middle of the green brimy sea.