"I know who you are and I saw what you did"

"Little white lies" she would call them. Perfectly blatant out and out lies dipped in confectioner's sugar..... "Divinity for the devil", I thought. She whipped 'em up for every occassion...."It makes him feel better" "What she doesn't know won't hurt her", and on and on and on...... And she smiled with crocodile teeth, bleached until they were stained a liar's shade of white.....And I wondered....."Whoever are you fooling?"

I'm a tattle~tale. That's what I do. I tell. I spill. I blab. I spit it all out in giant bursts of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah " and then" blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. ... I'm afraid of secrets and little white lies. They always come back, a Mini-Pin after my ankles, snapping when you least expect it. And then they haunt you.....reincarnated on instant replay....tearing at your pants legs, your heart strings, the truth......

I'm fifty now. "It is what it is"......

I watched Shannon put her lipstick on. Peel it out of the twenty dollar cellophane package and roll it across her lips. The color bored me. And then she was bee stung. Her lips began to puff and swell. She lip-linered them for effect. Ready now. For Friday night.

To woo and coo,
to raspy voice them in.
Sexalicious.
At fifty.
Chapstick in the morning.

And that lipstick on his collar.....



nettleweed.......

Now I Lay me down to sleep....

I remember when it arrived. Trucked down from Tallahassee. My Great-Grandmother's bed. My Mom tucked it into the "poker room" and started stripping the blackened mahogany stain, grape jelly, off it's grain. I was enchanted with the wood grain that emerged. Patterns, telling stories, in the old plank. The headboard and the footboard are each one slice of mahogany, not pieced together, one slice of greatness. The Mother Tree. And it was mine.

Handed down from one eldest daughter to the next, to the next, to the next, to me.......I touched it and remembered my Nana under the cotton sheets telling me stories....."When Monk and I eloped...." I felt the magic then, of her barefeet peeling out from under the crisp sun-ironed covers, the heavy blanket tossed back breathlessly, and her panic, at the sound the sunday~suit~quilt thudding on the hand tied mattress might of made. He was at the window. Two floors up. Waving the diamond ring he had just won in a poker game. She left in her flannels.

My Mother. At Jacksonville beach. On the second floor with the lights out and the four mahogony legs centered in gallon cans of water. So the rats couldn't crawl up. Sleeping on the salt flavoured sheets with the ocean spraying kisses through the windows. The third generation of blonde haired girls to sleep here.

And now it was mine. I slept on it, in it, for years. Lounged backwards with the phone cord twined between my fingers painting my toenails up against the headboard. Stuck wads of gum on the siderails. Dreamed here.

When I inherited my blonde haired 7 year old daughter, we bought a waterbed with satin sheets, and moved it into her first bedroom. Draped the windows and it's soul in white eyelit and puffalumps and she grew up here. When she moved out and said " I want a queen sized bed" I understood. It was the same year, her Father and I divorced and we traded.

I sleep here again. One day, this ageless hammock will go to Kyle, my precious blonde haired grandaughter. Until then, she's mine again.

I prop my cast~footed leg up on two pillows piled at the footboard. Georgia takes the right side. She huffs and puffs and chases her tail in circles until she's just~so comfy and then settles in. Deja tiptoes on the pillows. Around my head. Kneading in my hair. The moon peeks in under the window shades. Casts shadows on my chest. Rising. Falling.

Ahhh, the stories this wooden princess could tell......

Scarlett O'Dare-Ya

I’ll worry about it tomorrow….

Ok, I could do it today. I could bite my fingernails, grit my teeth in the night….I could pace back and forth on the cat-hair- covered kitchen floor, taking deep moaning groaning emphysemic breaths. I could worry about it today.

I could sleep in purgatory, tossing and flailing, kicking the sheets off , mad dogs biting at my heels, and then yank them up around my neck again, cocooning in their cotton comfort, until it’s time to kick them off again…

I could suffer….

But I decided to live.

To laugh.

To be free, if even for only seconds….

So I banish you…
Gloom and doom,
Bill collectors,
Insurance agents,
Lawyers in your suits and ties with your billable moments,
Handsome doctors with your million dollar smiles and your million dollar
“the odds are a million to one, but don’t you want to try?” come-on lines ,
Sentimental Suitcases stuffed to the brim with black and white photographs of how it was meant to be,
Cryptic Karma, waiting to jump out of the closet and haunt me…

I banish you all until I look you in the eye and dare you to make me decide, to face your cheap little threats. Dare you to face me, facing you, and listen to yourself. It’s life man, live it….

You can’t wreck my world if I’m speeding, running faster than you can catch me. If I don’t look forward and don’t look back. You can’t rain on my tacky little Saturday morning parade, if I barricade you off, make you get in line behind Santa Claus and his 8 tiny reindeer….

Until then, I’m dancing.

Catch me if you can……

And then, guess what?…

Tag,
you’re it……


I'm going to the beach.....