In honor of World Poetry Day:
Desire
Some warm spring night
I’ll creep with the moss
to your window,
softly reach up and
scratch at your dreams
until,
ragged and worn,
sheets twisted in clouds,
you must
let me in.
I wake up sticky. My eyes hurt open. The room is still grey with dawn. My brain a cloud of half-sleep with wisps of half-awareness.
He snores beside me, whiskey-raucous, deep and drowning. Why do my eyes hurt? My mouth feels not my own. It is a giant’s. Too large and unwieldy for my face. I shift and moan, my hair is matted to the pillow, sticky. It all comes back, the night, even as the morning brightens through the window slowly coloring the walls.
He rolls and rumbles toward me, his arm an anchor thrown across my hip.
Sorry, he whispers wet and slurry. I get so goddamn jealous. And he pulls me to him, a sweat-slippery chest. The morning clears my head and I remember. And understand the ashen streak reddening across my pillow is my blood.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
(The phrase “I wake up sticky” was inspired by the phrase “I wake up sticky-mouthed” by Peter Meehan and David Chang in their article in the Fall/Winter 2011 issue of The Lucky Peach.)
and
(From lyrics Woke Up Sticky, copyright Peter Perrett http://www.justsomelyrics.com/2208644/Peter-Perrett-Woke-Up-Sticky-Lyrics)
All the stories previously posted are currently under Password Protection while I edit, organize, and prepare for possible submission which requires that the work not be posted anywhere online.
Password available upon request–just email me if you’re interested in reading.
Word Count: 314
The first word of the last story I write will have to fly like the non-random darting bows of a bat, sensitive as sonar to wring empathy quick and flowing with relative response from its readers.
The first sentence of the last story I ever write has to have the hook of a talon to catch and latch onto its prey. To intrigue and entice one to follow the crumbs dropped as sensual adjectives and excitingly active verbs.
The characters, particularly the protagonist, must be interesting as an unopened present yet as intimate as an unborn twin. I find her hiding in the farthest corner of the decade before. Between lovers back when relationships were rides in a prototype mini-submarine that navigated under the surface of blue-green rippled seas. She is a slice of a woman I’ve been, with bites taken out that are hardened as crust.
She brings with her the salt scent of the ocean, the gritty caress of beach sand. I will not give her the same heartaches, the same man. She will be paired with a man who has drifted through in an earlier time, unappreciated by the woman she was at the time. She will know the right things to do this time around and come through it with proud scars of delicious sweet knowledge.
Fiction is reality twisted to fit into a fantasy concept of what could have been. Fiction is the root of the tree that is hidden from earthly eyes. Fiction is life as it might be, good, better, bad.
But I play with my puppets gently and let them sleep back into sweet escape when I’m done. Bundled in cotton batting soft as clouds, their eyes close in repose of dreams that will bring them back to life when another last story calls them again to lace up their slippers and dance.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology