bought new snow shovel
i look out window each day
not a flake in sight
All posts in Creations
42
“We’re all out there, somewhere, waiting to happen.” – Jeff Noon, Vurt
Today a friend of mine suggested that I examine the symbols in my Waking Life, as they can be more profound than the ones I encounter in dreams. It didn’t occur to me to do so until just now, on the crest of some desperate epiphany. Continue reading →
Sisters of the Storm
I have met the love of my life, the girl of my dreams, and my soulmate.
They are three different women.
My love burned out my eyes as I watched her fall
I wandered, hands outstretched, in search of her in the country of jagged glass
Our greetings no longer Amiable, our stares strange,
I still remember the sweet blood on my cut hands, some of it was mine.
Another I met in an afternoon vision, folded note slipped sideways past my ribs,
Warning me of a red fire boiling in from the east.
My men barely had time to lash me to the mast
The last knot snug just as the golden voice rained aching over my heart.
I remained ever an island to her, she a sunset strangely settling in the east again.
A span of time and circumstances cut between us and I fear I cannot Bridge it.
My soulmate stirred beside me in sleep when our names were the alternating beats on a drumskin stretched between the teeth of gods hunkered in secret parley until one sneezed and one laughed and the skin snapped, a canvas whipping in the wind, paint crying over the map of all the child-smudged continents from where they would send for our varied parts only to scatter them over and over from the cliffs of the moon down to clay-slick river valleys where red monkeys sift the water for the syllables of the incantation that will make us whole.
Her voice is the sea foam call Beckoning Again from the cave where fire children raise pinky fingers to write messages in mercury. For her I will always answer, will always fly and fall, shudder and be still.
The three will never weave me a skein of promises, a blanket under which I can sleep untroubled
The three will never confer and trade secrets
The three will never compare their familiar bruises
But when they cry out from each horizon they are a chorus and their song finds a common center
They are the Sisters of the Storm and my oceans boil when they draw near.
Gumdrops
About two years ago I lost the ability to fly. Not like Superman, nothing so impressive. Just a loose kind of upright hovering, as though my heart were suspended from a cloud passing high overhead. The onsets came unannounced: Electricity warmed my spine and I simply inhaled, drifting upward, dangling until I could push off a nearby wall or streetlight.
It unnerved passersby. Spontaneously flying people were unsafe or at least untrustworthy. Continue reading →
On the Moon
Somewhere on the moon is a picnic basket.
You leaned against the black monolith
and I leaned against the crashed capsule.
We ate a meal of heart-shaped sandwiches.
It is so bright on the moon that your pupils turn to pinpricks
and the stars vanish.
So you can understand why it was hard to see you
against the monolith,
against the infinity draped along the lambent lunar curve.
We put on our star goggles to see clearer.
I showed you the fire the wise men followed.
You pointed out the comet that would boil away the oceans.
We watched the earth appear.
When I tried to put it in my pocket,
you stopped me,
saying it would only end up on my shoulders.
You gave me the mountains of Tibet, instead.
“Start small,” you said.
The line where the light side meets the dark is so distinct
it looks as though it were painted there
with the ashes of every hopeful campfire.
We danced back and forth through light and shadow
like a car weaving at high speed down a forgotten highway
where laws were too lazy to get up off the porch.
After a while I grew to love being dizzy with you.
On the moon, even the most serious things
weigh less than a golf ball.
In our hurry to catch the train back to Earth
we forgot the picnic basket
and several other heart-shaped things.
I still see them now and again, as though through a telescope.
The secret of the moon is that there is air there,
but only for a time.
My Voice
I will not apologize for the train wreck
You brought all that baggage
Now you sort through it
Because now I’m hunting for my voice, see
I got tired of all the parallels
So I uprooted tracks to grow ladders out from stairwells
My voice might be up here in these mountains
Echoing between griffons’ nests
Or nestling between a goddess’ breasts.
Goddess?
No, I’m getting confused again
Just two soft hills I passed when I used to take the train.
I will not apologize for stealing the bed sheets
You taught me to make a parachute just in case
When what I needed were sails to visit space in my starship
My voice twists tongues with the sun, hon
It don’t parlez vous you and your moon talk
So bright and quiet, but visited by shadow
You know, the dark train that could
But I should not concern myself with lunacy
While my voice still calls to me
From the lip of God’s coffee cup
Take a sip and stay up to see the griffons landing on the street with me
As I come flying home.
Growing Up Gringican
“Monserrat, that’s French, right?”
My dad was born somewhere in Cuba to a huge, loving family.
No, scratch that.
His parents were both dead before he was five
And he was raised by a loving uncle.
No, scratch that.
My father’s parents were dead and he was a slave, forced to work in the fields
With the other unfortunate Cuban boys.
One day, he escaped to a nearby village to the north.
The mayor took pity on him and the community raised him like their own son.
Or so I am told.
“Monserrat – Isn’t that French?”
Thank God my dad wouldn’t let me learn Spanish
So I could understand the secrets passing between my parents
Right in front of me.
Thank God I can’t write a beautiful bilingual love poem
And exponentially increase my chances of getting laid
By some Latina hottie.
No, Spanish would not have been helpful at all.
When I go to Lottaburger, I might actually get the very same burger I ordered.
I might have slept through Spanish 101 instead of getting my ass kicked by French 101.
“Ohhhh, Andre Monserrat, eh?” said my merciless French professor.
“Don’t think you won’t have to work in my class, because monsieur, I’m going to make sure you work.”
So for a semester I Je vaied, I accent agued, I com ci com caed.
But, folks, my parents could have named me Fred Astaire
And I’d still be a skinny white boy who can’t dance.
In short, Je ne parle pas Francais! Comprende?
Naming an Hispanic kid “Andre Monserrat” is just plain cruel and unusual.
It’s like naming someone Hans Olafson and telling him he’s not Norwegian!
Like I said, my father was raised as a community service project in some nameless Cuban village.
The country lavished opportunities on him like the generous uncle he fabricated to hide the truth.
Many years later, he found himself as one of Castro’s bodyguards.
Standing behind the little dictator in his booth at the baseball game,
My father thought, “I worked so hard for this?
I trained for this?
I bear an automatic weapon to protect this man?
I smell treachery on him
I am so close and he trusts me implicitly.
I am so close and his eyes are fixed on the batter.
I could end him here.”
But then there would have been no Andre.
My dad did not assassinate Castro.
Instead we have a missile crisis and Elian.
Instead we have one more poem.
“Monserrat, like the island?”
That was cool for about three months because of that Beach Boys song:
“Martinique, that Montserrat mystique.”
Oh baby, yeah that’s my island all right.
Everyone there speaks French, the language of love.
On my island, we reach up and squeeze the sun to make Mai Tais
Which we drink all day long.
But last I checked there was a big volcano ejaculating all over the jungle
Straight up on the Pompeii tip
While a bunch of Rasta-looking guys ran screaming past the CNN camera crew.
Folks, that is not a piece of real estate I want to have anything to do with.
So my dad bided his time.
Let Castro give him an education.
Let Castro groom him to step into a place of power.
Let Castro send him to East Germany to study with all the other promising young Cuban men.
Now was his chance.
But there was a wall.
Castro was far away; he may as well have been on the moon,
But there was a wall.
He pressed against it to feel the warm promise glowing from the other side,
But there was a wall.
Through shrewd dealings and whispers through cracks, he made friends on the West side.
The appropriate documents were created and placed in my father’s hands.
If this were a Jerry Bruckheimer flick, there would have been searchlights and a suspicious commandant at the gate.
If this were a Jerry Bruckheimer flick, a sniper would have accidentally put a bullet through the head of my dad’s best friend as he happened to step in front of him at the proper dramatic moment.
But this actually happened and my dad silently passed through the Berlin Wall like the last gasp of air fleeing a closing tomb.
We used to live in Mexico, when I was very young.
In Mexico we had a mansion, shiny cars and servants.
What were Mexicans for if not to cut our lawn, cook our food, and wash our clothes?
Walt Disney taught me not to question.
I mean, Goofy is a dog and Pluto is a dog,
But when Goofy throws a stick, Pluto goes running after it
And what is up with that?
But clearly one wears a collar while the other does not.
That is an important difference.
Yes, I was justified in looking down on the poor Mexican beggars on the corner
While I rode around the neighborhood on my Fisher Price big wheel.
They were to be pitied, even though there was more culture on that street corner than I would see in my home my entire life.
When my father was awarded citizenship, the USA asked him,
“Alfredo, by what name shall we know you?”
In Cuba, everyone had like 15 last names.
In America, if you had a name like
Alfredo Rodriguez Monserrat Ramos Bauta,
It made it difficult to fill out the Columbia House Music Club membership card.
He had been going by Rodriguez, but he picked Monserrat so his future children would not be discriminated against.
“Monserrat, that’s French, right?”
In America, it will only take you a short while to become a citizen,
But it will take the rest of your life before they’ll let you live here.
So my father found out.
My dad thought he could become a Spanish teacher
Until he discovered you had to take 100 tests in English
To prove how well you knew Spanish.
Then he thought he could become a lawyer
And perhaps fight against discrimination.
But you had to take 100 tests in English
To prove you knew what discrimination was.
Later he got involved in computers.
The computer didn’t care what language he spoke.
“Monserrat – That’s like a movie star name!”
My sister is white as Britney Spears on the outside
But black as Moesha on the inside.
She may act black, but her kids are black.
Mostly black.
My niece Dominique may begin to question
Why she is not as light as Mommy
Or as dark as Daddy
And she may ask me
“Uncle Andre, what am I?”
Am I qualified to answer? What am I?
A Gringo Cuban American? A Gringican?
Hispanic boy whitewashed in Ohio?
No one told me what I was.
My family legacy is a scrapbook of stolen newspaper clippings,
Pasted together in a way that is aesthetic and perhaps even historical.
No one passed me a flame to keep lit.
No one handed me a golden flask filled with the echoes of ten generations, or five or even one.
How will I account for these things?
Even if I cannot answer these questions, I can still answer my niece.
I will not say, “You are bi-racial.”
I will not say, “You are an amalgam of Cuban, Finn, and African American.”
I will not say, “Your heritage is lost forever so shut up and finish your Coca-Cola.”
I will not say, “Your identity is bound up in varying quantities of melanin, and you better get it sorted out quickly.”
I will say to her, “You are beautiful. Go be beautiful.”
Some of the Parts
My reflection got a new girlfriend so it’s not around in the morning to help me shave.
My appetite left me ’cause of my lack of taste.
My shadow is at the cleaner’s and my memory is in the shop.
My heart won’t return my calls
And my soul is on tour with Kurt Cobain.
I remember how he looked out at me from the cover of Rolling Stone:
Staring down a train and he wouldn’t step off the tracks.
I’m feeling empty as MTV.
My ribs are like a storm drain catching the occasional used up dream.
I’m afraid to have any of my own dreams,
Presently being so insubstantial.
Any kind of hope in my chest would carry me into the sky
On lazy warm currents of yesterdays long gone by.
No, I shall remain careful and earthbound,
stitching together a new shadow from old newspapers,
a tattered silhouette of personal ads dragging behind me
as I go a-questing for my recently departed parts.
Well, now isn’t this a sight?
I should have investigated the pool hall straight away,
but I was feeling optimistic.
There’s my reflection, bright with the stolen light of its new girlfriend.
Appetite’s over there turning a plate of barbeque wings into bones to fence the graveyard where tiny ideas go.
At the pool table, my heart is arguing with my memory,
Cue sticks raised like green felt jousters.
Heart says, “Linda Lee was watermelon on the hottest summer’s day.”
“I can’t abide such crazy talk,” says Memory. “She was as worthless as Ray Charles at a peepshow!”
On the bar is a telegram from my soul:
STILL ON TOUR. STOP. KURT SAYS “HI.” STOP.
THIS TRAIN IS THE ONLY WAY TO FLY. STOP.
Small Hands
This is the world and I cannot hold it
Like a mother holds a child
Like a lover holds time
I better try grabbing onto the rings of Saturn
Before I try to hold a world
Spinning fast enough to hold us to the ground
Giving our hopes stunted wings
Pulling the sand through the hourglass
With a world spinning so fast you’d think there’d be a roaring wind
And there is, but we’ve got the volume down so low
That mother’s crying cannot be heard over the rustle of father’s newspaper
But I hear the wind
It sounds like I’m jet skiing the slipstream of a 767 en route to the cover of Time Magazine
It sounds like I’m showering in Niagra Falls, but I never get clean.
Like eyes that can’t bear to meet.
Like my small hands trying to catch you before you fall.
It sounds like the breath I take before saying “I think I see God.”
In college, the cafeteria ladies thought I was Jesus
And made sure I got the hot rolls
But they didn’t see me that night when I was so drunk
And the door was locked
And she was just right there
And I made such a mistake
I woke up with the room spinning, the world spinning.
My friends and I swaggered through our college lives
Immortal. We would never say good-bye.
But then a wind started to pick up the leaves, our plans, and our time
Into a swirling dance
Our feet were heavy
And our hands were so small
The world spun faster
Through the endless cornfields of Greencastle, Indiana
Through the deceptive peace of Albany, New York
Broken by a ringing phone.
When I answered
I heard a voice, once so calm,
Breaking like old violin strings
as it told me a horrible lie.
Neal, who was beautiful;
Neal, who had composed music from some dream country I could not even look upon,
Had not made it out of the woods
Somewhere he lay pale and still
Bathed in silent white light.
The secret was out:
One of us was mortal
One of us would only live in photographs and “remember when”
And I realized that none of us were out of the woods yet.
I’m knocking on Heaven’s door
I’m out here with a list of questions that all start with “Why…”
Why doesn’t everyone see You?
Why can’t my hands be bigger?
Why did love and lonliness both have her face?
Why did the phone have to ring that day?
The world spun through Albuquerque, New Mexico
To a house big enough for our silence.
Again, a ringing phone.
I got the call that explained, at the end, my grandmother said she could see Jesus
Or maybe it was her favorite grandchild whose voice she’d never hear again
My wife came home and stood at the opposite end of the room
a thousand miles away
Torn between the bitter chill of our dying marriage
And my warm sobbing for my grandmother who was dead
She compromised with a hand on my shoulder
And the world spun faster
It spins through the girl ahead of me in the checkout line who is the love of my life, but neither of us will ever know it.
It spins through the man who sleeps in the alley so I can waste money on a hamburger I didn’t really want.
It spins through that call I should have made weeks ago to a phone that will never ring again.
It spins through my arrogance and my self-righteousness and my small, small hands.
I’m sorry I could not catch you.
My friends and I used to say “Good-bye”
Now it’s just “Don’t die.”
My Girlfriend is So Fat
One morning I woke to find myself pressed against what at first appeared to be a giant pink walrus.
Strangely enough, it had tattoos, just like my girlfriend, except they were smeared and stretched like Sunday comics on silly putty.
Blue eyes suddenly blinked out at me from deep inside the wrinkled vastness and an enormous belch erupted from the creature.
Great Googly Moogly! It WAS my girlfriend!
I staggered into the kitchen to find that the second coming of Colonel Sanders had indeed occurred sometime in the middle of the night and every scrap of food had been raptured away.
Even the dog food was gone.
Come to think of it, I never did see little Sparky again.
But all thoughts fled my mind as I turned to face the lumbering colossus that was my girlfriend, now wedged inside the kitchen door.
She says to me,
“I know my belly’s got more steps than an Aztec ziggurat, so I’ll understand if you don’t want me anymore.”
Time stood still as I had an emergency group huddle in my brain to prepare for what was sure to be the most loquacious, magnanimous lie ever to fly from my lips.
She was huge any way you looked at it, especially from behind.
She looked as though Madam Tussaud and R. K. Sloane had collaborated on a wax sculpture of Dom Deluise, Luciano Pavorati, and Orson Welles all diving for the last bit of pimento loaf during a Star Trek transporter accident.
She was gargantuan, she was Brobdignagian, she was…she was…beautiful.
Quietly, inexplicably, it happened.
I had considered the well-endowed woman before, but not one so… uniformly endowed.
A newly-wakened hunger scorched through my loins as I said,
“Oh, no, baby, I like it like that!”
And not only that but,
“I want to play Jaque Coustaeu to your Marianas Trench!
I want to burn all the maps and be the new cartographer of your Grand Canyon!”
And from that moment on, our relationship began to expand in new dimensions.
Did you know that just about anything you could possibly need to make love to a tub of human flesh is readily available on the Internet?
A coal miner’s helmet and a wetsuit, for example.
Use your imagination.
Now we do all our clothes shopping at Wilderness Outfitters.
She holds up a slate blue Coleman 2-person tent and I say,
“It goes with your eyes, sexy.”
She buys two plus a tight red 1-man pup tent for those special occasions.
On the way home we pass AJ’s Construction Supply and she gazes longingly at the Caterpillar D400E Series II dump truck.
“Some day, princess, but you’re not quite there yet. Until then, my Ford Superduty will have to do.”
Oh, I adore my little mountain of love and I’ll do anything to make her happy. And she responds in kind.
Since I’m a Star Wars fan, we’ve worked this extra kink into our relationship.
Late at night, when I’m nestled in her labyrinthine folds,
I whisper, “Say it, baby. Say it!”
And she replies, “Bo shu da, ah yis cabba Wookiee.”
Oh, yeah!
One night we’re watching the Discovery Channel,
a special on the mating habits of blue whales.
It’s not even half way through when she slides her flipper up my thigh.
Time to break out the Crisco!
Oh, I agree, it’s not for everyone.
Like the call of Mt. Everest: many hear it, but few respond.
Only a chosen handful have a hankering to sit down to this all-you-can-eat love buffet.
Few men ever experience the pleasures to be had, elbow deep in his lover’s capacious embrace.
Few men will have their courage tested by the threat of a back brace or even a full body cast when one night she wants to have things her way.
But I am such a man.