These people are freaking me out.Who are they? Where do they all come from? What are they doing here? The last question I could guess at, based on appearances. Sitting around, socializing while sipping hot beverages. But what are they all saying? What am I supposed to say? They nod and wink and gesture with cups in hands and indicate social cues in this improv theater of evaluation. But we all know what they say about appearance. Don’t judge a gift horse in my mouth. I see past all these double bluffs and into the great conspiracy of culture. This doldrum drumming along to which everyone is marching in time. Even the rebels are on cue. Enter stage left! Say something dissenting! Shake your fist at the great Oz in the sky and don’t bother to look behind the curtain of your own persona! Now exit! Stage right! We’ve had enough of that.
Maybe it isn’t the people freaking me out but the cafe itself. The walls are dripping with pseudo-creative portrayals of whatever the fuck passes for art these days. Twisted images of faces and nature in swirls of color and form. It seems like they might be moving, so I gotta give them credit for that. But what does it all mean? What am I supposed to know? What do they want me to see? They got little cards with descriptions next to each one, and while that’s at least a starting point, they don’t tell me how to look into this mirror. The biggest thing in print, below the little faded gray, don’t-read-me-because-I-am-being-difficult italics 5-word description of the piece, in a bold-black jump off of the paper and grab for my wallet numbers, is, of course, the price. More valuation. So that’s how I see it. I see someone who pours their heart out on the canvas in a fit of foiled embodiment and is then forced to put a price on the head of their genius. I hope they enjoyed the ride because this destination sucks. You gotta love the process because the finale is always a whimper.
Maybe it’s this process that’s freaking me out. I got seven days to make something of myself, and here I am on what? Tuesday? And I haven’t even invented plants yet? What the fuck am I talking about? You cant invent plants. You have to grow them. Only the great Oz can pull a plant out of his ass and call it creation. We little people gotta stick to the process and wine and dine our notions until they reach our hands, and we manage to fumble about with the sticks and stones until our straw man takes form and goes on a journey to get a brain. Let me know if you find it, my son, because I sure could use a bit of that.
Maybe it’s the drugs that are freaking me out. I swear I haven’t seen straight since the ’90s. Too few too many times taking a trip across the road to find out what the chicken found on the other side, and while everything seems pretty much the same again, I just can’t seem to settle back into my cultural role. These expectations aren’t measured for me. The sleeves of fiscal responsibility hang too far over my hands for they were cut and sewn for someone much bigger than I. Except in the crotch. These too-tighty-whitey truncations bite into my creative urges and make me sorta angry all the time. I try and adjust the fit with a casual grab and tug but these sleeves are dragging on the ground behind me and when I try and gather them up I find there is no end to them. These shoes I am trying to fill are clown shoes. It’s a setup. No one can do it. I gotta tear these clothes off and run through the streets. But I gotta do it really clever like so I avoid the cliches and engage the heart and brain and courage I choked out of the wizard before he sent me home. I gotta make this life count! I start sweating with terror as my throat closes, and my eyes bulge. This brain is too big! This heart is too full! This courage is going to get me killed!
“Can I help you?” Says the far too innocent barista. Well, that seems pretty far fetched at this point. But I’ll give it a try.

Just when I feel I’ve got a handle on things, the rules change. But that’s Ok. I’ll just make my own layer cake. I don’t follow recipes well anyway.
I improvise. I don’t obey.
I hate being told what to do.
If you don’t know what to do, read a book! Google isn’t the only source! Do some research. Ask questions. Be curious! Educated doesn’t mean you know everything. It means you know how to analyze data and find answers.
Like with recipes.  I get the gist of a dish, and the main ingredients, and then add or subtract salamanders. Sometimes the result is sticky, sometimes a tornado, but never the same tickle twice.
Minah birds bitch fight outside my window. I’d love to know what gets them so worked up. I mean, what’s so important? He stole my branch! That was my cockroach! I guess it’s the same with humans. Squabbling for territory and resources, and who gets to fuck whom.  Are there spinster minah birds? Babies that won’t leave the nest? So, minah bird dads build a downstairs nest for the pothead offspring who sit around playing video games plotting how to supplant their parents?
Too many ingredients in this one. A food combining nightmare, not worth the indigestion.
That’s the best way to learn though. You gotta take chances, make mistakes, and get your hands dirty. Nobody ever won a Pulitzer by writing the same old thing.
The birds are quiet. Residue of rice milk in the blue cereal bowl dries up. Granola is too sweet. Should be outlawed. Or fed to minah birds who don’t leave the nest. Little fuckers. The bag of velvet seeds that need drilling await a creative urge. My drinking buddies sprawl in still, post-debauch poses. Five males and 2 blond females make a bachelor party on my writing desk. Tick tick tick. Here’s where I’m consistent. When I slow down, I hear the clock.
The birds kick it up again. Older sister minah bird, tired of dirty socks on the dining table, pecks her brother in the neck.
I’m sure there’s a moral here. There’s always a moral. Or a grammar lesson. Taking up spiders in the mind like cherries in a teapot. Frightening in their complacency. Oh God, it gets weird here, in the tackle box.
Maybe I’m not as good a cook as I thought.

​
My eyes hung on the painting strung onto the weathered cedar fence, ethnic style monarch butterfly nestled between cocoons spun with silver thread, wings pushing out, chalk bones and glinting marigold flowers.

I’d love to share it with my sisssterrr... Stabbing pain in gut, eyes welling, heart fell like stone in empty cauldron.... memory glitch resolved to bleak recall.... “she’s gone”.

Feet staggered numb to a patch of dirt and flowers... head hung, tears slowly dripping little diamonds on the ground,... “can I take a picture of your painting? I.... I wanted to show my sister but.... “....cheeks wet, eyes searching....

“Do you know the story of Dia De Los Muertos, The Day of the Dead?” said the blond angel of a girl glowing, cheeks flushed, madonna with child in belly, “when our loved ones come back to visit, and monarch butterflies help them make their journey, and the gold in the flowers are the riches welcome in the next realm... do you know that story?”

Raising camera stepping back, glancing down to same flower in the painting, the same one my sister is likely spending in the place she is now.... and with a click it was saved to my memory card.

A fluttering stirred hairs around my face as an insistent butterfly darted up and down and circled then escorted me along the path, through the garden, across the street, to my car then vanished, leaving me entranced and spell bound.

Murmurs of my sister’s voice, her last words still echoing.... “Do your art Lory, do your art...”.
I wanted to see the world through her eyes, placed camera in her hands that day. She showed me the sky in our backyard looking up towards the heavens, and the wagon wheel promising adventures in our dream Gypsy wagon where the butterfly painting got pasted on it’s door while surrounded with marigolds and the very same butterfly that followed me through the garden, down the path and to the car.

Touched with inner knowing of an unlearned process ... layer upon layer in a word doc, who would have thunk... art emerged from random items from my virtual memory.

Immortalized with memories of oil paints and turpentine wafting and love worn wrinkled mother's hands, pallet knives and tapered brushes, were sister’s eyes peering central and faintly overseeing, through the clouds and trees and sky surrounding her with pasted butterflies and marigolds, and pic of a birthday party with wings looming in background mom had painted... the very same butterfly...

A collaborative work emerged in a virtual world painted with pixels and memories between a mother and her two daughters and a wing and a prayer... and a butterfly sharing love between realms.

Blond artist woman now with year old child in arms, gazing long, trembling hand grasping collaged print with wagon, door and her pasted painting on a soul’s journey, eyes moist, stories woven, touched by butterfly’s and angels in her pregnant garden.

​River stones
Black and smooth
Shaped like coins or elliptical eggs
Act like obstacles for the flow
Much like the current state of affairs

I wish to be water
Undisturbed by the hitches
Moving like a dancer from the arms of one man to another
Flicking heels and leaping
A single drop dissolves into vapor
Somewhere a dark cloud weeps and releases it back to earth.

Someone told me to act
And I shuffled my feet from stage to stage
Black tuxedos and character shoes
The image of something I wasn’t
Something refined
I know I’m not that.

I dug my toes deep in red clay
And licked salt off the reef
Watching silver fish tango between my legs
Wearing the current like a gown on their scaly backs
They reminded me of something 
I can’t remember it now.

The dark moon rose
And I released my blood back into the earth
Watering our peace lily in the garden
Hoping she’d take my primordial ocean and transmute it into buds
Her petals wilted and fell
Life is no match for concrete and global warming.

My son’s eyelashes flicker at 3am
Soft whimpering leaves his pillowy lips
And his head nuzzles into my breast
He is safe here and I know
These moments are fleeting
At best.

I approached the gulch from the East
Pine needles crunched under my boots
Green islands floated in the distance
While whales breached and sang sad songs to each other.
I think one of them lost their baby too.

I went up the mountain alone with one mission
Releasing trauma can be a singular act
I let out a primal scream
Felt it vibrate against the cliff face
And under my feet
But I didn’t feel better
So I walked back down in silence.

Every dawn my eyelids blink open
Like clockwork
Neon pinks and orange streak the sky
That’s the time I acknowledge the humming 
Something further away than my fan
And far more vast
I think it might be the sound of the universe spinning
I hear that a lot.

Small birds flap their wings outside my window
Their grey feathers speckled with white dots on the crest of their necks
Sharp talons scarring the branches of my mango tree
And singing something I don’t understand
I like it though.

My son picked up a purple shell on the edge of a ravine
Mermaids were lounging at the bottom and singing to him
Their multicolored fins flapping in a seductive attempt
Beckoning him to sing or dance or swim in step
He threw the shell back at them
Because he didn’t understand.

As I watch grey clouds fill the atmosphere
Palm fronds gyrate side to side
They are the only indication where the sky ends and the ocean begins today
I think I might get lost in that space for a bit.

    I look down at the broccoli in the glass dish. I blink, thinking my eyes are playing tricks on me. Nope, the little brocollettes are waving at me. Jazz hands, but broccoli. Come on, they beckon. Go for it.  So I bend my head and dive into my belly button.
    I emerge in the cloister in Arles, France. Van Gogh spent time here, walking this square corridor, itching to paint the colors that swirled in his mind. But he’s not here. Only Mao Tse Tung and the Tidy Bowl man. Mao is hitting his forehead with a board and reciting a rap verse over and over. The Tidy Bowl man just wants to trip him, but he has to do it without being obvious, or he will be punished.
I look around.
    A huge rhinoceros wearing a purple cape gallops up to me. I can’t see where he’s come from and I’m scared he’s going to trample me. But he stops, stands up and says, in delightful English-accented tones, “I’m due at Wembley stadium, but I’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere. Can you point the way?”  I point up. He unfurls green iridescent wings, and, with two great wing-beats, is gone.
    I sink through the cold stone floor and find myself face to face (or is it face to butt?) with a worm the size of a barn. Or, no, I’m as big as a poppy seed. Now I understand how the rhino could find himself so off-course.  It belches purple powdery stuff and in an instant I become a sound wave, snake-shaped, bouncing off drum heads, against infinite eardrums, everywhere at once. This is just too diffuse.
    So I focus myself into a particle and allow myself to expand.  I glimpse the worm (who is now wearing a smoking jacket and sipping on a martini) and swim through some sort of watery bog. I zip through bubbly water until I reach terminal velocity and blast out of the ocean in a spray of blue iridescent wings. I have some too!  And scales. I test my breath, and sure enough, fire comes out. No breath mints for me. I’m headed for Wembley stadium to find out why the rhino was headed there.
    Soon I see the stadium. There are thousands of fantastic creatures, in every color and configuration you can imagine. The rhino isn’t easy to spot, so I tune into that frequency and settle down next to him. With no words, I ask the question.
    His answer: Because I don’t like broccoli.