| Night Toys I assemble many candles on a late August night, knowing winter approaches. This night I have gathered gin, vermouth. I dress it in lemon and lime, not the winter olive. By candlelight, in the waning sunset, I gather cards--- to write dying friends, to play solitaire when the gin warms. Did I mention cigarettes? I still indulge when by myself. I could smoke a pipe now, as I did when learning nicotine’s pleasures. I play music---blues for awhile. Then silence. I want to hear Life, and too much of it went into wars over piano notes. Among the cards is a dead friend’s picture; it warms me, remembering her well-lived days. “I know I’m held,” she affirmed. Candles flicker memories of hummingbirds. On the deck steam rises from the hot tub, I take everything in with the steam. In my closet pearls, turquoise, coral resonate. Back on the mellow-light deck, I hear you playing me in oboe symphony. What abundance--- silk of sheets. Loves, losses, savored oysters on fate’s half shells. Mexican Fiesta It’s greenhuge, each ant blacksmall. It inches. Envenomed, it writhes, soon paralyzed.The advance party scouts ahead. Workers lug it as percherons might pull a wooly mammoth over a mountainous lip. They push, pull their hirsute conquest up the mossy wall. Elevate it as a communion wafer.It falls back past the beer bottle cap. More troops arrive, hoist the carcass up, up again to the nest’s adit in a crevasse. It’s the hour’s banquet for the horde, that helps itself, moves on. It’s inching... John Wayne rides in my bones tonight---cowboy more romantic than real. His pilgrim’s gravel-voice reminds me that before the world spun the global economy, Westerners gave the personal--- rough and ready, sharing and supportive---great value. Gone in a gnat’s eyelash---dealing person to person with honor in our handshakes if wild abandon in our freedom from millennia of chains. Wayne looks over my shoulder as I view the August moon bleeding crimson from impersonal fires, staggering through trees, blind to the forest, hungry, stalking, gobbling livelihoods. Jobs lost kill as much as terrorists. Rooster would ride out to right the wrong. How can I ride, now, beyond the greed vaster than Monument Valley of dream-killer thieves? Pennies to the rich mean riches greater than Ophir to most. Wayne shrugs, ashamed, bows his head for loss of community, for CEOs corpulence. Like Robin Hood he gallops, champions the weak, humble, confused. I pray for his successor. Let him arrive soon---recruit freedom defenders if only at the Saturday matinee. Manic Depression Fifteen passes on Nevada’s Highway 50 diamondback slither-dither between arrow-shooting flats, progress hardly possible in usual terms, panting toward Rockies’ apex. Bipolarity: easy come, easy go boom to bust and back high roller high, crapped out. Paintbrush’s red euphoria. A-blast desert to smithereens Ecology conscious, gold mine mad. Drunk in the dry. Scared shitless of empty space? Grow an ego to fill it. Laugh at conformity. (spoiled brat gratification makes sense when you can fry your brains in a hour- freeze them in like time.) Work hard, play harder. Little gentle, much compassionate---obscenely raw, obsidian brilliant. Sand Mountain, Lake Tahoe. Dust devils dervish, Angels calm a hooker’s grave. Stripped down, geared up, screwball voluptuous, tempestuous--- more and more and more in less and less and less. |