Category Archives: musings

how the mind wanders while taking Z for a J

Death’s on the air
every time Z and I go out for a stroll.
Not the whiff of a smushed roadcake lizard. No, it’s
something stronger, more fetid and assaulting to the ol’ olfactories.

Just down the road from our house, there’s a family of gophers
caught in a cave-in, the spoiled remnants of coyote feast, or worst yet–
the half eaten bunny-snack of the dreaded puma who lurks obscured nearby
purring delightedly in anticipation of our arrival across its path.

Who knows what danger or rotting corpse may be challenging our senses
around the next bend? Provoking us into awareness and action?

Zelda snorts joyously–the stench of death and excrement delight her.
She would bark if there were anything larger than a chihuahua in our path,
so all clear on the scary big kitties for now.

My nose appears to have nearly doubled in size overnight, but that’s okay
because none of my facebook friends bothered to comment on my update/concerns
and none of my real life peeps even noticed. (Maybe if I posted a picture?)

It’s not the size that bothers me so much as the pain and the not knowing–
What the heck happened to my nose? Why do I want to put an ice pack on it?
Could it be I have spent my life so worried that I will be mauled by a puma
in my own backyard that I have missed the deadly spider tickling my nose
as I lay sleeping?

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merry unbirthday

Three out of every four years here I am reminiscing over the one song that feels like mine around this last day of February. It goes: “A very merry unbirthday to you!” (Perhaps, if you’re a closet Disneyfied song lover like me, you know it.)

There is no actual date for me to tag as the finish line/starting line of another year on earth, but I usually sharpie it onto the blank space on the calendar after 28, unless the 28th falls on a Saturday. In which case, I get a little sad and hopeless or creatively inspired (depending on my mood that particular year).

Funny thing about growing older, it was just yesterday that I felt I was a child in this grown up skin looking at the stars for the first time all over again. [This is the unedited version of me, mind you. I would strike this, take out the whimsy that is actually me, if I gave myself a few more minutes with that sentence.]

For all of my stately education, I have no career to speak of–because we don’t speak of coffee wenches with much reverence around here. What I do have is a hodgepodge of raw poems awaiting polish and eventual/possible publication. Wouldn’t you like to read a collection of poems about death and body parts and the intensive study of literature? Perhaps I ought to have a better fallback for Poet than career Barista.

I’m working on that, though I hate my resume, and I actually love my barista/baker job. I think my true calling may be stand up comedy in spite of (and perhaps due to) my intense fear of public speaking. I’ve read poetry for an audience, and it was their laughs that I wanted more of (I don’t think that’s a preference of many poets).

There is no rush quite like the one you get from putting yourself out there for all the world to gawk at and mutter about. And, if you’re lucky/witty enough, they laugh.

A Very Merry Unbirthday to You All! (Especially my fellow leapsters.)