Monthly Archives: September 2008

Big Paws by Milou

Once upon a time there was
A cat with unusually big paws
Her feet were as big as a car’s tires
And this is not what a cat desires

One day she was at home without any crew
‘Cause her owner was away buying some shoes
Suddenly it happened something very surprising
Now the cat’s feet were changing their sizing

First to the size of a window frame
(The cat already felt ashamed)
Then they grew to the size of a room
Then to the size of a house, and BOOM!!!!

The cat’s feet had now EXPLODED!
(And the room was fully with foot-pieces loaded)
Now the poor cat got out of the room
And looked at its feet and shouted,”YAHOO!”

The cat’s feet were back to normal size
And this she found was quiet a surprise
Her feet were back to the size of tires

And this she thought is what a cat desires

pig paws cat
photo by fastcat

A Thump on the Head

A Thump on the Head

We all have those confounding moments. Times when you lock yourself out or lose a coffee mug in the house. Maybe you are like me and can’t type. I took typing in high school and bombed that, just like I blew a typing test for a job. I think my hands battle with each other. Maybe it is my brain that is the true battleground.

I am ditsy. I may not seem that way at first. My British ancestry must give me that polished image. My husband is mostly of Irish and Norwegian ancestry. His influence has freed me. The word “should” is seldom used here. We live on a play-by-play basis, I’d say. Ditsy is accepted. I know partly where it must have come from.

When I was about ten, I had a big thump on the head. My friends, male and female, and I lived in a place where new homes were being built. We spent all our free time making forts and swinging from vines across the creek. My house was just below a circle. Our band of trespassers had been constructing a lean-to, with lumber the contractors left after a job. Normally, we used whatever we needed. We used the bathroom outdoors too.

For some reason on that day, I jumped on my bike with a “See y’all later. I have to go potty!” I flew down Old Springhouse Lane like Lassie running to a near disaster. That is all I remember. Even to this day, it is a black hole in my memory as strange as being abducted by aliens.

Pure and simple, I wrecked. My sister had been playing with gravel just above our driveway. When I cut my front wheel to the left at that troublesome spot, I body slammed myself. Nobody saw me crash. I got up, dusted myself off and went into my house to use the bathroom.

My mother wondered why I was taking so long. When I think of this moment in time, I feel queasy. It’s a wonder I didn’t go in the bathtub. When my mother went in to check on me, I was babbling. That is, I just repeated the same sentence over and over, they tell me. Maybe she thought the body snatchers had found me. My family hunted down my band of friends and tried to solve the mystery. It was like television when the satellite goes down. They had to get my signals uncrossed.

So, a trip to the family doctor did the trick. I remember smelling salts. If more than that was needed to snap me back into reality, I don’t know of it. Today, there would be an M.R.I. and much more.  I am sure there was a pump knot on my head the size of Stone Mountain.

Kids bounce back fast as Bolo balls on a paddle. You know that wooden gadget shaped like a porkchop that has a rubber ball tethered to it by a long rubber band. In no time flat, the gang was back at it, building our Taj Mahal on an empty lot. We hunkered down in ditches like it was wartime. We threw red dirt clods at any invaders. Instead of blueprints we had pokeberry juice on our fingers.

The day we wandered out to the shack, to find every board gone was when the whistle blew. Construction workers were onto us. Things had to change. I had even snuck into a home almost completed and threw a paper wad onto a newly varnished hardwood floor. To this day I feel immense guilt about that stunt. Kids really know no boundaries unless they are prickly as barbed wire. We collected slugs, the metal kind. We were a menace in our subivision. In fairness, my parents were strick like most. Emerging subdivisions just seemed ripe with mischief, like the Wild West. The new frontier was such a temptation. In time the open spaces and uninhabited homes were done for. Much more than a just a loss of innocence, I think I lost something too.

My head was knocked to the ground like I was a blow-up punching bag. In this day and time, when I am forgetful, I wonder if I didn’t get rewired when I had my bell rung on that day. Truth be told, I have been ditsy from day one but the day of the bike wreck is a wrinkle in time for me. Maybe you have been there. If you go into the bathroom and don’t come out, there you have it!  Brain farts are regular as rain.

elephant dream

I have in my care three elephants
two males
one female
they are very sick
from too much time in the heat of the sun
they’ve come to a place of shade and safety now
but they’re dying
the female is the sickest.

they have large ragged holes in their skins
burned into them by an unforgiving sun
weak and withered
dried and dying
drained of power
they wait and they suffer.

I’ve noticed them only recently
I know that without my help
their time is short.

I haven’t been trained to care for these holy creatures
so I ask others for help
one well-intentioned man
young bureaucrat in uniform
suggests a cage for shade and safety
they’re dying! I remind him
but they’ll be very safe he says.

others are not interested at all
some make jokes
this is urgent!
who will help me?

these animals need water
lots of it
more than I can ever provide
with the old buckets once used by
my father
my uncles
my grandfathers
elephants have other needs too
but water is basic and must come first.

I’m desperate
time is short
I walk up a slow hill on a back country road
(I’ve walked this road in younger days)
looking for someone to help me save these sacred beasts.

_____________________

Excerpted from Iron Man Family Outing: Poems about Transition into a More Conscious Manhood by Rick Belden. Copyright © 1990, 2008 by Rick Belden.

Warrior Of Light – The third cardinal virtue: Love

According to the dictionary: from the Latin amor: strong affection that drives us towards the object of our desires; inclination of the soul and heart; affection; passion; exclusive inclination; theological grace.

In the New Testament: So faith, hope and love endure. These are the great three, and the greatest of them is love. (Corinthians 13:13)

According to etymology: the Greeks had three words to designate love: Eros, Philos and Agape. Eros is the healthy love between two persons that justifies life and perpetuates the human race. Philos is the sentiment that we dedicate to our friends. Finally, Agape, which contains both Eros and Philos, goes far beyond “liking” someone. Agape is total love, the love that devours those who feel it. For Catholics, this was the love that Jesus felt for humanity, and it was so great that it shook the stars and changed the course of the history of men. Those who know and feel Agape realize that nothing else in this world has any importance, only loving.

For Oscar Wilde:

Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
(Ballad of Reading Jail, 1898)

In a late 19th century sermon: Pour your love generously on the poor, which is easy; and on the rich, who distrust everybody and cannot see the love that they so need. And on your neighbor — which is very difficult, because it is towards him that we are most selfish. Love. Never lose a chance to give joy to your neighbor, because you will be the first to benefit from this — even if nobody knows what you are doing. The world around you will become happier, and things will become easier for you.

I am in this world living the present. Any good thing that I can do, or any happiness that I can bring to others, please tell me. Don’t let me put things off or forget, because I shall never live this moment again. (Henry Drummond The Supreme Gift, [1851-1897])

In an e-mail received by the author: “While I kept my heart to myself, I never had a single morning of anguish or a single night of insomnia. Since I fell in love, my life has been a sequence of anguish, losses, confusion. I think that God, by using love, managed to hide hell in the middle of Paradise” (C.A., 23/11/2006)

For science: In the year 2000, researchers Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki, of University College in London, located the areas of the brain activated by romantic love by using a series of students who claimed to be madly in love. In the first place, they concluded that the zones affected by the sentiment are far smaller than they had imagined, and are the same as those activated by stimuli of euphoria, such as in using cocaine, for example. Which led the authors to conclude that love is similar to the manifestation of physical dependence provoked by drugs.

Also using the same system of scanning the brain, scientist Helen Fisher, of Rutgers University, concludes that three characteristics of love (sex, romanticism and mutual dependence) stimulate different areas of the cortex, and further conclude that we can be in love with one person, want to make love to another, and live with a third.

For a poet: Love possesses nothing and does not want to be possessed, because it is enough in itself. It will make you grow, and then throw you on the ground. It will whip you so that you feel your impotence, it will shake you to rid you of all your impurities. It will crush you to leave you flexible.

And then it will toss you in the fire so that you can become the blessed bread to be served at God’s sacred feast (The Prophet, by Khalil Gibran [1883-1931])

(next Warrior of Light Online Wisdom)

The Silence of the Fall

 

Tomatoes rested on the kitchen

windowsill,

waiting for the sun to turn them

orange.

The humidity was stifling.

I sat,

mesmerized by

the turning blades of the ceiling fan

as I pondered an

unanswerable

question,

then pretended not to hear

as you quietly closed the door —

left alone to wonder

when,

if ever

you would come back —

finally realizing

reality lies

somewhere

between dreams

and

broken promises.

The Divine Need

If only

from out of the aching

of this visceral inflammation

I might be reborn

on the shores of your lips –

cast like a spell

in whispered ponderings of awakening, and

 

be worn upon your sleeve

before partaking of skin

ripe for the taking

and delving deeply under it, and

 

be the bridge that crosses

into the taboo

where risk becomes exquisite and

your incarcerated secrets are freed, and

 

be the temptress

of scalding pleasure

and the sorceress of scathing pain

only to slather your rawness

with a richly emollient brew, and

 

be the driest sauvignon

to quench your parched soul

and stagger the indignation of the righteous,

 

and mostly

 

be the one to slake your desire,

then create your longing for more.

 

This is my divine need.

 

© 2008

 

An Excerpt from WALK ME TO MIDNIGHT

Billy Carolina was as small and round as an elf, with star lines around his bright blue eyes. He wore gold-rimmed glasses, and his blond hair spilled boyishly over his forehead. He was immaculate and stylish, yet somehow as wholesome as a Hummel figure. No more than sixty-four inches tall, with chubby childlike limbs, he had always lived an openly homosexual life decades before that had become stylish. He was as famous for his friendships with the glitterati as for his fiction, being a confidant of the British royal family–in particular, the late Princess–as well as many film stars and musicians. Now Billy was speaking softly but regally, in a unique, high-pitched voice with a lisping Southern accent punctuated with New Yorkisms.

“Just what do you think you are doing?” he scolded the servants. “You must learn to think through authority before you blindly follow like Nazis. I can recommend you both for the L.A.P.D.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Carolina,” said the butler, “but we can’t admit anyone into the house until seven o’clock.”

“Don’t touch me. I can find the door. Are you being bounced too?”

Susan nodded at him in amazement as he maintained his dignity and formality under the circumstances. Now the two stood together in the elaborate stairwell, as the servants locked the door.

“You must be Dr. Susan Rutledge. Bitsy talked about you all the time. Her brilliant psychoanalyst from the Cherokee reservation. Don’t cry. Come on, we’ll share a suite at Abbey House–I’m already madly in love with you just from what Bitsy said. We’ll spend the weekend wishing we were the right genders. Don’t they teach you how to wear jewelry in New Mexico or wherever you’re from?”

“Tucson, Arizona,” Susan supplied as Billy shortened the length of her bird-fetish necklace to align with the neckline of her coat.

“Let’s lose this scarf –you look all bundled up like Peter Rabbit with the croup. You must teach me how to put the Cherokee evil eye on them. Can we drape this fetish around a Cole family gargoyle?”

“It’s Zuni,” Susan said lamely, feeling the power of Carolina’s personality overwhelming hers.

Billy waved aristocratically to her driver to hold the limousine’s door open, and they settled in the back seat.

“Assisted suicide? No, it was murder of course,” Billy Carolina declared as he lit a brown cigarette held in a diamond and gold filter. “It was absolutely a murder and the police covered for little Pepper Pruitt and Doctor Dracula. I hate both of them.”

Susan looked at him in disbelief as he continued.

“Don’t you think I’d know a suicide from a murder? I’ve been through at least twenty suicides in the past year. Besides Bitsy would’ve called you and me.”

“I think she was trying to call me,” Susan said.

He patted Susan’s hand and gave her a monogrammed linen handkerchief for her tears.

“You still have emotions,” he observed. “I like that in a person.”

“It’s just that I loved Bitsy, and I thought if she were suicidal, she would have confided in me, and now I feel …”

“…slighted from the grave.”

“Exactly,” Susan agreed.

“Well, she didn’t slight you, she thought the world of you, and she wouldn’t have checked out without leaving us a forwarding address.”

“I was afraid I was being a narcissist thinking that.”

“They did her in and we both know it.”

“What about her will?” Susan asked.

“Forged.”

“The medical records?”

“Purchased.”

“The video?”

“Spliced.”

“The mask she put on her face?”

“Forced on her.”

“The police report?”

“Officialese.”

“How do we prove it? It’s the perfect crime.”

“There’s no such thing,” Billy asserted. “But they’ll get us first, that’s the only thing.”