Particles of Me

 

Blake discovered the world in a grain of sand,

and I am now among those grains,

tossed from a blossoming, pale sweaty, soft palm

into the darkening surf;

my last wishes.

 

I am dissolved within

the seaweed and misty, salty air,

deep within a child’s sand castle

slowly eroded by the high tide;

particles of me mixed with coconut oil

rubbed into the brown skin of a Brazilian beauty,

more of me still at the bottom of a

black Labrador’s  joyous day of digging.

 

Particles of me

follow the rhythm of the tides,

taking me on a journey

into the deep green and blue ocean currents

leaving behind the beach of my youth;

hoisted high a top my father’s shoulders

before being catapulted into the oncoming waves,

time after time,

until my fear turns into giddy anticipation.

 

 

 

Monarchs of my Youth

 

 

She climbs effortlessly, 

soaring against a stiff unpredictable wind,

her curved noble yellow beak

cutting through the dry, hot air,

higher and impossibly higher still.

 

Splayed against her back,

I dig my hands deep within her warmth;

soft feathers,  beating heart,

smooth, thin bones.

 

She carries me away

from all that is the

heaviness of life.

 

In her prime a messenger

for Apollo, Hermes, Mercury and Circe,

her green eyes of emerald scan below.

 

Where once there were hills of wild chaparral,

canyons of lavender,

golden poppies and milkweed,

beautiful stained-glass Monarchs of my summer youth,

mice, jackrabbits, coyotes and deer;

reduced to road kill,

endless suburbia;

a foreclosed wasteland.

 

I hope we not meet the same fate as Icarus,

but wings of wax these are not.

She rises  ever higher still against a warm updraft,

my head buried deep within a plumage of my childhood:

nautical theme wall paper,

Farrah Fawcett ,

plastic green army men ready for battle.

 

I could do worse than disappear

into the down feather pillow of my youth;

never to return.

 

 

Big Green Moon In North Laguna

 

 

Dodging shiny tank-sized SUV’s

and their texting, latte-sipping,

GPS-distracted, cell-phone chatting

high on prescription drug driving,

foie gras arterie clogged

utterly miserable, corporate

pencil pushes and peons,

of which I was once one,

I maneuver across a highway of road kill,

through wooden skeletons

of track housing,

under rusted, barbed wire

that once kept back the cattle,

but now just cut through my jeans.

 

I continue through cool chaparral

foggy ravines with cottontails

frozen like statues,

black stink bugs,

vines with dried hollow gourds;

once drinking cups for Indians,

the bones of whom lay far beneath

this Pelican Hill Golf Resort,

too green and manicured,

from which fertilizers seep down,

eroding sand cliffs,

poisoning the tide pools below.

 

I breathe in deeply;

earth peppermint coolness,

salty sea mist,

and dance along the cliff,

arms spread wide like a

yellow-beaked, red-clawed hawk,

over a narrow, rocky beach

vast darkness of ocean

and beyond that;

a big green Laguna moon,

I can almost touch.