Faces

Faces on Facebook want you for a friend on strict lists; they're being collected like fossilized sandollars, how many can you find after a storm? For me, there seems to be less air. If I haven't seen you since school I flush and breathe faster when you step over the threshold. Or that part you played in all those years of family, those holidays when hearts would race.

On Facebook you can type it or read it, but you can't catch the drift, the scent, the breath taken in. How can I be a friend to a computer screen staring full force at me too brightly white?

There is no emoting while typing and I can't see your face. I can't see your feelings flicker across that face, eyebrows raised, eyes squinting. Squinting by itself doesn't tell me what you are. A downturned expression? Criticism? Concern? Apathy? Please not apathy, no. It's just too hard. Am I somehow misunderstanding? But here, next to me, a twitch of the corners of your mouth; now I can read the whole book.

Can you care on the web? I can't see you on the web. I can't speak that you can hear my concern which is now dulled. I want you to know how I say it. Witticism or wisdom or howling, I can't mouth these to you on this keyboard. I want to react, not reply, I want to jump at your tone, eyes waterning with worry. Are we all stymied by the new on off on off on off in some binary code? zero one zero? 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0? Will generations x, y and z speak by pictographs? This on and off may one day send mind messages, only my generation will be deaf and blind.

So speak to us carefully, communicate with sign language or touch; we don't quite hear you, we just don't understand.



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Dustbath

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A soft dove colored dove pair settle into the breezy spot of sifted dirt on the lawn, bare of green. They preen and stretch out a leg and a wing, nudging the other, wife or husband forever, warm in the sunny summer heat, content as monkeys' midday snoozing in wild, faraway tree limbs.

Sunflowers sink with a thud into gopher holes, stump chewed neatly, sharply. Tasty underground parts are up for grabs if you're down there, watching an edible candelabra dancing above in the ceiling. We know they'll come, sniffing and scuttling dirt aside with little hands curled and digging, heaving neat, pebbly soil behind. Holes so deep they're bottomless. Listen as chunky sharp gravel rattles down the perfect circular sides.

I think of the traps near the poisonous stinking poison for sale at the too bright hardware chain warehouse store. And poison itself, ready to end the ruination of my garden. I think of the traps so it will be gently organic, but how can gentle describe decapitation and then stuffing the bloody thing down a hole to warn the others. I drowned one once, horrible, but practical. Brutal big cats and bears kill for dinner. I kill for vegetables.

Wire nailed on a frame, tipped over and filled with freshly composted, steaming fluffy, dirt; brand named "feather light" for used chicken feathers proliferating in this town. For now I poke in peppers (sweet) and squashes (zucc), started from seeds from who knows where. In Fresno or Bakersfield in flat neat robotic rows under pure flat hot sun, drip lines standing by, computerized for perfection, for clean bright distribution. Wholesale to resale to me to dirt to hope for a flourish of green in my garden.

I could buy my veggies for less. Far less. Iron and minerals, trace though they be, and C and maybe niacin, from my own dirt feeds me while D comes from outdoors while tending little, green, cellulose-bearing vegetables. I strive to fill up my belly with five servings of something fruity, dark leafy, something my animal stomach doesn't always want, except maybe at dinner; steamed to go down easy.

Watering is my favorite, but weeding makes demands as does trimming and watching for bugs (sow and pincher) and snails; organically because we're going to eat the plants. Chase those jays who want peanuts, who will hop, hop, hop on springy legs for sunflower seeds, but may mistake a seedling for food. This expensive vegetable garden joins us to our Eden. That magnificent solar system flies by ignoring Adam's work. Tender sunny hands reach like blind moles forced out of mounds, my turn to reach, to pat that hot, dark, shreddy mulch. Then sprinkling; keeping the blowing dust down and elements in.


...

Again

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Take the mailbox off. Off from the side of the road where it stands for 20 years or so. Once plowed down. Twice replaced.

No bats this time, mowing off one by one down the avenue, leaving letters scattered. No crumpled box in pieces littering the miles. Just lifted up, straight up off the cemented 4x4, straight up in the air and gone.

This time we're alone, unlike the baseball batter's tour.
Prank?
Need?
Appreciation?

With paint and brush and spraying can, silver and green and blue dripping. Liquid steel squeezing out, frosting like slurpy dollops of rubber-bronze. Like kisses, with a spring on top. That box came into it's own. Art and immaturity.

Now don't think more thought, not about targets, vandalism or convolution; nor kids nor men nor in between. Thinking must be locked tight.

The new gray utilitarian is up. There.
Numbers sticking and sparkling like cracked opals.
Reflectors walk on the sides.
Too clever to be boring.
Too different to escape notice.

That's who I was and am.

Danger comes with notice. But, please still care. Don't steal me straight up into the air and away. Like I dream and wake in false tears; reality just a stuffed head, but my dream in day has me falling, stolen.

See the mailbox, odd but bright?
A slight turn of the head ok,
but leave it.

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