Rising Tide – Micro Memoir

In Newport, on the side of the road, my family pulled over to play by the sea. I took photos of the water with my little Instax Mini while my father in law watched my daughter. In an instant, the tide starts pouring in. I see my daughter alone on a jetty, my father in law nowhere nearby. I start calling to her to come back. She points to the water and starts to climb in to get back to me. She cannot swim. Frantic, I am sprinting toward her. The sea has claimed so much of me in my dreams. It will not take my daughter from me in what passes for real life

“Til Human Voices Wake Us and We Drown

My boat is small and rickety. It’s just me and the vast blue sea. Suddenly a violent swelling – a wave rising. At first I think the wave will be large and crash momentarily, so I brace myself for impact. But then the wave doesn’t crash down. It becomes ginormous. It looms over me, watching me. “When you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” It boils up to a height that makes me miniscule. Then, stillness. So still. If this wave falls down on me, I will drown. But it doesn’t move. It only watches. Until the sound of voices…

Vice – a Vision

I fill my prescription for vice and carry it home. The birds snub me at the sight of it. In the family room, a river flows clear as glass. I will inject insight in ten minutes. First, I must cool off in the freezer, my blood snow crystals protruding from my wasted heart. Letters float down the river, boat shaped thoughts from those abandoned on the shores of paradise with plastic strangling them. People in my taxonomy run up the current to bury our dreams, and then we die. Vice is heavy, fills the syringe slowly like syrup. I will glow with my own private, disinterested light. Cold light, liquid light, light around my bones. My sins a dark figure behind me seen through to as the light beams into me mercilessly. In the corner, dust bunnies paint my corrupted face without pity.

The Poem

The poem is feral, climbing under the bar and making a shirley temple with vodka. My body is bereft. My spirit sits outside myself flying my middle name on a ribbon like a balloon. The poem tells a tattooed man a story about that time she and____ burnt down the auxiliary doorway to Invisible Beauty. I grab the poem and she kisses me, her curves burning me. Fusing to my own. Tangential heavens speed away from the crime scene. The poem stumbles out of the bar. I stumble away from the bottle. We collapse in the meadow with the horses and she injects pure liquid ecstasy in her delicate veins. As her translucent skin bruises, I see the stars blink and then shut. Blackness overtakes us like old age, slowly then all at once.

Winter

Silver trees sparkle,
the diamonds of January.
The fireplace is a dear old friend
from a nudist colony.

The mystery is that
there is no mystery.
Everything is as promised.

There are commercial breaks
from the interesting.
Sales on refurbished hearts.
The galaxies speed away
From one another
as though broken by a cosmic
infidelity.

Winter is a parable
for surviving without Love –
that cheerful shyster with
echocardiograms tattooed on.

Lucid

I am quietly lucid.

I don’t say this to brag.

They say the only thing

A person can best the Devil in

Is humility.

Humility,

That soft yellow sheath

Over my glowing hot skin.

But sometimes my mind

Makes memories without me.

Other times she sneaks into my soul

And my prayers come out as cotton,

My hallelujahs thorned and unprepared

For the lustful day.

My mind plays,

Swinging between despair

And ecstasy.

Despair reeks of old fire

And dust storms.

Ecstasy writes my name

In pink pen all over Virginia.

I wish my mind was still enough

To watch children grow up.

They grow like bitterness between

The berry bushes,

Poking into the canopy

Like vines looking for something to strangle

So that they may survive.

I love all of them,

Though they chose mothers elsewhere.

Lucid Lisa loves lemon lime

Laser lights,

And she dances

(Hold on while she climbs

Back into her I)

I dance as though my feet

Were in love with the soil.

A sordid, sultry affair

Between earth

And her resident looney.

God has granted me a vision

Of aprons and crude stars

And I smoke my dreams

On my neighbor’s porch

While he mines for lobotomized diamonds

Crisp and certain.

Water

Rivers run through my names, scoffing at the idea of unified identity and advantageous silt. Along one river is a boat named the Unbearable Blue. Named for Memory’s daughter – a blue so deep it makes me ache. My heart goes spastic. Horrendous banana flavored vanity leaks out on the floor like an unsupervised ocean. Help. The sharks are here with their collection of teeth and wits.