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A jaguar appears on the patio

We walk together down a mountain

We take off our shoes to touch the ground barefoot.

Key in the door, unlocking home

We boil water, fry eggs, drink tea, and share a few words.

A jaguar appears on the patio and asks for meat, milk, and honey,

Not a pound of flesh, not skim, not NutraSweet,

Only the real thing, which is all we have to give.

Practical fairy tales: Moving swift as Mercury

One morning after she rose as a phoenix, the beautiful princess heard a song in her head, “Nowhere Man.” She knew that the man was Mr. Carrot. She closed her eyes and saw him in his faraway land. He was moving at an earthbound pace and his body had become boxier than when she knew it very personally, and within that box of chest through ribs a hardness had established itself, a hardness with very little sparkle.

“Making all his nowhere plans for nobody,” the Beatles sang inside her head. The beautiful princess cried, and she didn’t analyze why. She was just too tired, of inflating and deflating people, of believing in a fortunate or an adverse condition, a condition contingent to peace of mind.

A someone somewhere, a nobody nowhere. Mr. Carrot, he had been an entrancing place, rather like a magic forest through which she had passed.

Let him be wherever he is, she thought, and I will be here, moving swift as Mercury.”

Note: Mercury was the ancient Roman god of communication, the messenger god.

My lover is the obstacle and the remover of obstacles

My lover is the obstacle and the remover of obstacles.

He gives me a kiss and a scepter.

Understand, his lips do not touch my body. The kiss is given as valentines are.

What sounds like obstacle?

Icicle

Ventricle

Manacle

Miracle

Practical fairy tales: Residue, doo do doo

Once upon too many times a beautiful princess noticed that Mr. Carrot reappeared. She felt compelled to contact him. Or he called and emailed. Or in a dream they were making love and in a nightmare he was stuck in her lungs like acrid smoke and she woke up coughing.

The beautiful princess told her princess sisters, who knew her history with Mr. Carrot, about a recent reappearance, and they railed at him. “Asshole.” “Shithead.” “What a fucking jerk!” At another time, perhaps in another life, their anger and cursing would have provoked the beautiful princess’s own anger. Now, as she heard more than one of her princess friends suggest, “Turn that cad into a cadaver,” the beautiful princess felt amused by this ghost of good and bad times past.

Mr. Carrot was busy, overworked, and stressed. He had told that to the beautiful princess, and he was talky talky talky about his own obsessions, ocupado, señoritas, so self-absorbed that the beautiful princess’s words he heard only as worship of himself.

She could have thought that Mr. Carrot was habitually impervious to happiness, but pondering him was pointless for the beautiful princess and it harmed her. His ghost was a disturbance of the peace.

Pondering Mr. Carrot was projection. He was a residue. Residue arises from memory. The beautiful princess benefited from contrasting residue with reality.

The ghost combusted and the beautiful phoenix princess ascended, sporting the gold leather evening bag, an extra lift, that she inherited from her mother.

The ghost evaporated and the princess in her comfy tennis shoes pressed the pulse at her wrist then kissed it.

Residue dissolved when she sang “doo do doo,” like Lou Reed in “Take a Walk on the Wild Side.”

The beautiful princess heard herself singing, solo and in harmonies with myriad princesses. A new Hallelujah Chorus.

The beautiful princess’s friends gave up their railing and she and they took to wild-side walking, known to the wise as crystal-clear desiring. Limitless desire fed them love, and now they listened to handsome princes who bore its fruit, not from any labor but from love itself.

A time defined by honey

I return home from visiting friends and family who I love and who love me. I am sated from conversation and food. Travel has sapped my energy.

For close to 20 years I’ve traveled a lot, for work and pleasure, in the United States and internationally. I travel easily and come home full. Now, for a while, home is the only place to be.

At home it is hotter than 7 suns.

I entertain my cool head.

A tow truck driver verbally displays to me, who sits in the passenger seat of his vehicle, a passion for guns. He mentions his high IQ. Then karma. I say, at the end of our short trip to a tire shop, “It was fun talking with you.”

In a waiting room 2 workers in residences for the old and the infirm talk of low income, comparative shopping for an axle fluid change, and administrators who they like and dislike.

A fat woman with the energy and skin tone of health teases herself about her love of food.

Unwanted immigrants and other citizens wait for rain as the clouds build every afternoon.

I soften like the girl I was, I am, in my mother’s arms.

I am quiet like the sky as the rains get ready to test the strength of rooftops.

Sacred tantric texts reveal what every yogi knows: mind rules the world, mind bends it, mind in its ordinary state is clear, and empty of concoctions, intellectual or fantastical (which can partake of each other). Yogis may read tantric texts. They may be scholars of Buddhism, Taoism, or embodiment. They may theorize and philosophize, they may write books about the history of yoga. None of that matters. Practice does.

People try to hold their world in place, to keep it from changing so that it can stay what it is, which nothing can. The rain does not hold back–a drop over there on the patio, a torrent for miles with bolts of lightning.

I eat Greek yogurt, densely rich like sour cream, a little less tangy, with local honey from a 12-ounce jar. The label reads “Sonoran Desert Honey.” Beneath the words an illustration of saguaros and prickly pears and a tree, ironwood perhaps, conveys the expanse of the land in which I live. I like knowing, from the information to the side of the picture, that Sonoran Desert Honey “is a pure natural blend of mesquite, catclaw, ironwood, saguaro and other springtime honeys.” The reddish gold liquid is the infinitely sexy complement to the thick dairy. The honey is startlingly sweet, even after my eating it days in a row, a most desirable partner for the mildly tart yogurt. (Before buying the Sonoran Desert brand a couple weeks ago, I hadn’t eaten honey for years.)

An attractive man helps me choose a gunpowder green tea, the smokier of 2 choices.

I water the plants until the rain comes.

In New York in March I met a man’s who’s a delight. I don’t think that I’ve called any man but him a delight. Our romantic interlude at his home in April was absolutely satisfying. I feel no desire or need to spend more time with him. I tell my friends about it all. “I feel like I’ve just heard a novel,” one says, and they and I accept the mysterious goings-on of a happy heart.

I’m listening to a clock and birds.

I’m drinking that smoky tea.

I’m living in a time defined by honey.

His feet in paper sandals

A friend of mine wears heavy, black boots, every day all year round as far as I can tell. I’ve imagined his feet in sandals and kissing each foot. A vision–him standing in paper sandals that I’ve covered with my kisses in a lipstick close to the color of my mouth. I think the opportunities for enactment have passed.

Practical fairy tales: Mr. Carrot

Once upon a time in this big wide world a beautiful princess, or 500,000 of them, fell in love (or just flat on the face). Fell, but not for the prince, who, as they knew and we know too, never exists, but for something close enough to that fantasy to cause great confusion: the man who didn’t love back but who promised to, promising so well that even beautiful princesses, who knew better but just couldn’t help themselves, continued in a state of disability to pick themselves up.

Then 1 princess said to another, “Your man keeps dangling the carrot.” And the second princess returned the favor to the first one, who said, straight-faced, just this: “Mr. Carrot.” Those 2 words loosened all the muscles that kept the princesses from smiling, all 500,000 (or more) of them.

And lickety-split,  like a cottontail seen at sundown, the false luxury of a phantasm disappeared, freeing the minds and hearts of every beautiful princess who had ever lived, all of whom, dead for centuries or living just like you and me, down the street from one another or right across a rainbow, put on their red shoes, which waited, ready, always at the front door, to dance a princess to her favorite hangout for a special coffee drink or dessert, which, as you may have guessed, was anything but carrot cake.

NOTE TO THE READER ~ Princesses, while they perfectly thicken the plot of love, are simply a literary loveliness and convenience, as the author’s hope is that readers who may not be princesses, due to economics or to gender, sex, or some other self-identification, but who find themselves in the princesses’ plight, might likewise find their self-rescue in the embracing humor of their friends.

Stripes and bows

I saw a short, tight dress in a shop window. Pink and red bows, rather large, floated relatively randomly over a background of black and white vertical stripes. Insistent connotations. The female body as a prison cell for any man tempted by flirtatious femininity. The female body imprisoned underneath that  same feminine overlay.

Sexy for ourselves

In the play Coming in Hot (see “The play Coming in Hot,” April 7, 2010), a young woman’s story drew a soft, ironic laugh from me. Her smarts saved her from being raped by another soldier with whom she served, and during formal questioning about the incident, the interrogator states that the young woman wore a black bra under a white T-shirt. He uses the statement as an accusation, the pathetic, ancient, worn-out, yet terrifying charge to the woman accused that her dress or behavior caused an intended or actual criminal act of sex by a man. In other words, the man’s conduct was the woman’s fault. My laughter may seem perverse, but its catalyst was the insane chutzpah of systemic, institutionalized stupidity. I imagined other women laughing too, silently or otherwise. Women’s astute laughter. It can bond us whether we’re sitting next to one another in a theater or thinking similar thoughts from international distances.

A black bra symbolizes sex, so a woman wearing a black bra is a symbol of sex, and a sexy woman can only mean slut because women who show that they’re sexy or who like sex are sluts. The “logic” of that progression completely bypasses any regard for women’s liking to dress as they so desire, which may indeed be conventionally sexy. The transparency of the garment over a black bra adds to the “fact” of deliberate seduction. (Whether women dress for themselves, for men, or for other women is a subject of perennial debate, but it isn’t the subject here. Neither is the subject of women’s actual ability to choose or show how they’ll look sexy–at those times when they feel or want to feel that way–in a culture that readily misapprehends women’s sexuality.)

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Coherent

I imagine that most of us have experienced the “need” to explain ourselves to someone we love, whether that person is kin, spouse, lover, or friend. We think that we must be clear or that the other person requires that. Often, such a need happens during or after a fight, and the source of the need is defensiveness. We have something to prove or we have to be right. Often, the other person is demanding that we explain ourselves, a demand that may be verbal or that may be aggressively implicit.

I don’t remember what my lover and I were talking about when he said, “You don’t have to be coherent,” but we certainly weren’t fighting. I do remember that the subject was deeply personal and that I was wanting to be clear about something I was feeling.

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