A plane flies over at 30,000 feet. Not the first time. We’ve seen it all before. Some of us first hand— and to one passenger in first class sipping his bottomless Mimosa, having another, reclining at a Virgin Airlines exclusive forty-five degree angle, staring with bull eyes through cotton windows as those precious stock symbols of his tick by, watching someone else’s dollar fly into a hungry engine wing as if being shredded, as if being pureed solely for his amusement, juiced, from cash to kale, taking it in with but a grin, and from where he’s sittin’ it looks, well, from there it probably doesn’t look like much down here at all. Or does it, Captain? Au mais contraire, from here, ground zero, my hammock clinging with dear life to the limb of a ripe banana tree, every fruit whispering pick me, pick me, all eyes peeled on the infinite ripples forming over a Pacific-fed, saltwater stream who’s current stimulation is supplied thoughtlessly by the trope of water nymphs hanging out on lily pads a gently blowing— yes, from here, from where I’m laying it all looks pretty good indeed—looks to me like all I could ever want or need. Sure is peaceful, I think, but it’s peace having taken the most provocative of form I’ve ever seen. No love lost here—
Left my cave
Was a scared, stubborn baby, was a boy— stayed in Womb nine months and twenty seven years. Nine pounds going on one fifty! This womb of mine was a dark cave that rendered me senseless, but hey, ‘least it was warm— was food in tube. And it was safe— knew I would always be safe so long as I was tucked in there. I had my activities. One of my favorite things to do was pull my knees to my chest, tuck my head, and for no reason past reflex, close my eyes. Yep, that was how I slept, in a ball—could sleep that way for days, could sleep that way all winter, could sleep that way for good and I wouldn’t miss a thing. Although occasionally, I’d hear noises, would feel vibrations, some good & sweet— called those lickings cause they smoothed, like wet whispers or wind-stung chimes they were the humming of birds and the buzzing of bees, and they soothed, while the others, the loud & sudden ones, oh god, they were called thuddings because they made the tummy rock, they made the stomach fluids swell, carrying my breadbasket deeper into the ocean’s oven— took hand-clapped thunder to rock my cradle. When I couldn’t take all the so-called ‘stimulation,’ I would thrust my legs and jab never-cut nails into those padded walls of hers—take flesh of my flesh, a bone to pick unformed. ‘Let me out!’ I would scream; ‘no, no, no—not yet,’ I would moan, premature in my ways. Then I would curl up, rocking to and fro like a dead horse shoed to bowed ski boards and beat. We did the downhill rock. The ‘fetal position,’ I found out later it was called, also helped with the nightmares—
The Siren’s Serpent Song
After a solo, untragic four hour maiden sail south the moonlit one-o-one, I arrived in a city where my virgin ears, no less than one full moon turned, had been exposed for the first time to the siren’s tantalizing tentacles of serpent song, as if eight separately teasing tongues whipped and lashed my inner lobe, stinging my ears till they upset the wax, a voice tickling with its melodic feathers at the most base nerves of my brain’s formidable stem, and splitting, at last, by the ends like strands of ove’grown hair, the siren’s serpent song, where soon thereafter loosely threaded moments were yanked against better judgement into spans of a lifetime, and I would experience the paralyzing weight of that sinking lead silence of hers, of theirs, of the all too few serpent sirens who at once do not belong here, and yet in harmony come to drag me home, along with anyone else in their path, to another world beyond, a world so far under the sea that we’ve all entered back into space. I was hooked…