Boarding the Astral Plane
Living on the astral plane would be so very camp.
When you lie upon the ground, you never would get damp.
No one would delimit the boundaries of your soul.
Anywhere or anything could be your final goal.
If I could book a ticket on the astral plane,
I’d hop aboard and never come back to earth again.
Prompt words today are astral, camp, book and delimited. (Never heard that one before!)
Click on photos to enlarge. Silk Floss Trees.
Dear Son
Everything exhausts me. I’ve lost my zip and moxie,
so I’m surrendering control and giving you my proxy.
You can handle matters––earthshaking or mundane.
Having to make up my mind has grown to be a pain.
Today began my countdown for withdrawing from my life.
I’m hiding from decisions, the news and other strife,
compressing the world’s problems into a tiny ball
and hiding it someplace obscure that I will not recall.
I’ll binge-watch old TV shows like Dynasty and Friends
from their initial episodes right up to their ends.
I’m sleeping in ‘til ten o’clock, going to sleep at eight,
throwing away my calendar. I need not know the date.
Here are my credit cards and checkbook. Do with them what you will.
Run away to the Bahamas or pay my water bill.
I’m relying on your character and inborn need to please.
If you don’t pay the light bill, I guess that I’ll just freeze.
Please don’t report your payments. Don’t bother me at all.
Do not text or Facebook. Don’t tweet or Skype or call.
From here on in my life, as planned, is going to be a breeze.
No cooking or dish-washing. I’ll eat takeout Chinese
for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I’ll just do what I please––
I’ll rock for hours in rockers, my cat upon my knees.
I’ll have no need for intercourse. I’m cancelling the phone.
I’ll fill my life with pastimes that I can do alone:
Sudoku and Solitaire, crosswords and jigsaw puzzles––
no lady friends, no social sites. No kisses and no nuzzles.
Type two Agoraphobia is what they’ll say I’m suffering.
But only you and I will know that I am simply buffering.
I’ve been without phone and internet for two days.I’m posting this at a local restaurant.
Prompts for today are proxy, mundane, countdown and compress.
Premature Delivery
I can’t defend or explicate the reason for my ardor
for that triple-decker cake residing in my larder.
Tomorrow was its due date, the delivery premature.
Now I have a compulsion for which there’s just one cure.
My love is unrequited. That torte has neither lips
nor anything but calories to slip around my hips.
At this extravaganza they’ve planned to celebrate
my forty-second birthday on my birthing date,
there must be a cake to eat. I must be resolute
to not pre-sample one small bite. I am of fine repute
and do not want it known that I’m unable to resist
cake with chocolate icing, and so I must insist
that you call a locksmith to secure the door
with deadlock and with padlock and perhaps with one lock more.
If my cake survives past midnight and a few hours tomorrow,
I will defray embarrassment and a good deal of sorrow.
For minute after minute and hour after hour,
I fear resisting chocolate cake is far beyond my power.
I was born to greatness—to talent and to fame,
but when chocolate comes up missing, it’s likely I’m to blame.
Prompt words for today are extravaganza, resolute, unrequited and explicate.
A room. A window. Outside the window, an entire world that I have not moved through for so many years. Some of the world comes to me, it is true, and I am not so reclusive that I do not let it in. Marietta brought her newest baby just yesterday, and I held it as though I have held a baby every day of my life in spite of the fact that I have not held a baby since that first baby slipped away from me, into the arms of another woman I have never known the name of. That baby was ripped more violently from my arms than it was from my body hours before. I was not given a choice. No one knew. The baby vanished and then I vanished, off to another country. Off. . . .a cough. I spin around and look behind me. It is a new intruder. After so many years alone, two people entering my world. Perhaps if I’d kept the door unlocked all these years, more people would have come other than the boy who brings my groceries and the other woman with the many layers of skirts who brings me new medicine when I have need of it.
I do not know this new person. It is a young man who carries a machete in his hand. He is very tall. Very very tall for a Mexican, so perhaps he is a Bedouin or some other Arab from a tall tribe, plopped down in America in the way many of us have been positioned here by fate, by circumstance or by force. His skin is that beautiful golden coffee color of someone naturally dark who has also been in the sun for long periods of time or for a long lifetime.
“Disculpe, senora,” he says, as he moves into the room. When I speak to him in English, he switches to English. He has seen my tall palm with the fruit and the seeding husks hanging dangerously loose. He can scale this tree and cut them for me. It needs to be done, senora, and if I have no money to pay, he will do it for no more fee than my friendship. And if I have no friendship to offer, then he will do it for the good grace it will bring him in the universe and perhaps an easier ingress into heaven.
It is an omen, I think, and I surprise myself when I give him permission to trim the tree. He cannot know how much he looks like a young man in my past and he cannot know how uncharacteristic it is for me to allow anyone at all into my life, my room, my trust. Now I have an obligation to this man I know nothing about. He may be dangerous. Certainly, he carries a weapon. The branch of the pomegranate tree taps taps on my window, as though a strong breeze has come up in this still day. It is the fingers of the afternoon reminding me. Warning me. But then I see that it is the movement of the young man as he brushes past the tree that has set it in motion.
A large turquoise dragonfly rests on the branch that has stopped moving and that now sits isolated. Another dragonfly approaches it and seems to attach itself in an arch and they go flying away together in this impossible configuration—a broken circle. How two creatures can move as one is not something I have ever learned, not since the one person who was a part of me for so many months was pulled from my arms still weak from childbirth. If they’d waited, I would have been strong enough, I tell myself. I have been telling myself for most of my life.
After they took from me what was mine, we took a drive to a large place with many chairs. Many chairs and many people, then a corridor. Then I was on an airline and in spite of my terror, I fell asleep. I was a thirteen year old girl, accustomed to doing what I was told to do. I woke up in America, where I was driven to the beautiful house of my aunt. It was here I lived for ten more years. Here that they expected to give me a new life to encourage me to forget my old life, but as I sit for all these years in my isolation, it is the old life that I remember and remember and remember.
He woke up agitated and sweating, turned over to face in her direction. She lay on the adjacent pillow, staring at him with a haze of dreaming still over her eyes.
“I dreamt I got the job,” he said, his mind swarming with the details of discarding, packing, arranging for the move. Then, his mind switched quickly to the alternative. What if he didn’t get the job? He had been in this state of agony for weeks. Either result contained grounds for worry.
She stirred. Reached out for him. “I had a dream,” she said.
“Oh, yeah?” he said, intent on his own quandry, barely aware of his own mechanical response. “Anything pertinent? I’m looking for signs.”
“I dreamt I was the moon.”
For the dVerse Poets prosery prompt: The Prosery prompt starts with a line taken from a poem, and asks you to write a piece of flash fiction incorporating that line, in full, somewhere in the piece of prose. To make it a little more challenging there’s a word limit of 144 words. The line they chose was “I dreamt I was the moon.”
For 
