Not Enough

Just not enough time to look at your face.

To memorize the lines there, the smile lines, the laugh lines, the color of your skin.

It was too long.

This time in between tasting you.

Having your kiss on my mouth.

Holding your hand in my hand.

Laughing with you while the sun streamed through the window and my heart fled out my body.

Absconded by you.

I realized later.

I hadn’t opened my eyes enough.

So love lost in the moment.

So taken with the abandon.

I forgot to look.

I forgot to get my fill.

I didn’t get enough.

I sound like a junkie, don’t I.

A little love junkie.

A little tortured and twisted and sighing in the wind.

When.

Oh.

When, will I see my baby again?

And see I must.

See I demand.

With my eyes, with my hands.

To.

Take the measure of you.

Holding images against the braille of my heart.

Reading all that lies in between the shadow and the soul.

The dark drift of my dreams and the raft of pleasure I find myself

Moored upon.

Open your eyes I tell myself.

Don’t get so damn lost.

So easy to get lost in you, in between the slipstream and the curve of your shoulder blades.

The cusp of your collar bone.

The smell of you.

Not enough time to take it all in.

Damn it.

There were things I saw though.

Oh.

Yes.

The dewy fall of a bead of sweat down the back of your neck, sweet, succulent, juicy, droplet.

I wanted to lick it off of you.

Taste you.

I watched it fall instead.

Sliding down your skin it mesmerized.

Or.

Your smile.

Searing me in half.

I did not see enough of it though.

Too busy instead kissing that mouth to take it in properly.

Astray in the lushness of your bottom lip, the holding space and the sigh of it.

I could fall down that velvet blackness and abandon myself there.

Gone.

Star dust to star dust.

Ashes to ashes.

Obliterated.

Abandoned.

Lost.

In this.

Exquisite dream.

So.

I reprimand myself.

Open your eyes.

Open them wide.

See.

See all of you.

As I am so taken with you.

Kidnapped.

Dazzled.

Captivated.

Enchanted.

Enthralled.

And.

Beguiled.

All the damn things.

All of them.

So.

Let me say it one more time.

So I dare not forget.

Open your eyes baby girl.

There is so much to see and see it all you must.

Imprints of you on the backs of my eyelids.

In the narrative of my blood.

Standing there.

Just waiting.

Waiting for me to see.

Waiting for me to see.

All.

Of you.

 

 

 

 

Happy Dance

I just did my little soft shoe Converse shuffle of joy.

I mean I busted out some serious happy dance moves.

I jumped up.

I wiggled around.

I giggled like an insane person.

Then.

Just for the fuck of it all.

I did it again.

I’m happy.

I have been given so much.

It blows my mind.

It really does and I can’t express it and I can’t believe it sometimes and the joy of it makes me burst out dancing like, well, like no one’s watching.

Because.

Um.

No one was.

Heh.

If I could dance for you I would.

Happy and free and silly and overwhelmed with gratitude and love.

With the shape of the moon half full floating in the sky.

With the sand dunes curling down to the sea.

With the smell of pumpkin pie spice and the glow of candles.

I would dance and stomp and twirl.

I like to dance when I am happy.

I have on some good French house music.

The Kungs.

And the internet hasn’t dropped me, yet, sometimes it’s hard to get the wifi down here in my little hobbit hole and when I want to hook up my phone to my Ihome speaker, it can drop and I won’t have my Spotify.

But tonight.

The wifi knew I wanted to dance.

To make photographs in my heart of my feelings.

Channeled with love, hollowed out glories of memories yet to be made and wanders where I capture all the joyousness in my life.

I feel seen and loved and cherished.

I feel special.

And lit up.

It is a sublime feeling.

One that I capture and hold, in the burrows of my bones, in the skein of my soul, in the stretch and uplift of laughter on my mouth, in the way it curves in a smile, perpetual and open, lifted and lightened.

I am feeling good.

You may surmise.

Your summary would be correct.

I have so much.

I can hold it in my hand.

The weight of it.

The heft of it.

Hewn there.

The glory of images and moments, succulent, sweet, piled up like persimmons harvested from the bins at the farmer’s market.

Excuse me.

Dance break.

Damn that is some good music.

Ah, music, you fill me up.

I was sharing with someone earlier about a time in my life when I lost the cello.

It used to sadden me, make me rumpled with remorse, with loss, with sorrow, with regret.

Not that there really was much I could have done or changed about the circumstances.

My family moved from an urban school system to a rural school system, both were public, that did not have an orchestra.

I was bereft.

I had been playing cello for years.

It was my passion.

My solace.

My retreat from the world.

I really had believed I was going to grow up to be a cellist in an orchestra.

Mister Ziegler was adamantly against my parents decision, my conductor, he was aghast when my family decided to make the move and I was no longer going to be able to play.

We were too poor for me to continue private lessons.

The school I was in loaned me a school cello, a beautiful full-sized lion of a cello, golden and burnt orange, I actually had two.

One that I kept at home and one that I practiced with at school.

The one I kept at home was the beauty and I was loath to part with her.

The school had not only been supportive of my cello playing–it was unheard of for a student to have access to not one but two stringed instruments–they also, I have no clue who cleared it, again, probably Mister Ziegler, for me to have once a week private lessons with a cellist from the UW Madison orchestra.

He was beautiful.

And his fingers stunned me, so long and tapered and elegant, they way he held the neck of the cello and his bow hand.

Shut up.

Amazing.

I had a good bow hand, but his was impeccable.

He had dark hair and dark eyes and was pale as blue shadows on ice.

I remember the other girl who got lessons, her parents paid for them, Susie, she was the talented one, the one with the really expensive cello, the girl who would become first chair.

At least that’s what Mister Ziegler predicted.

“You Carmen, you’re not going to be first chair, or second, maybe third, but let me be honest, you’ll probably be fourth if you’re lucky,” he told me one day as the orchestra emptied out and the students headed off to classes other than the annoying one that their parents were pushing them into.

The girls who quit because they wanted to grow their fingernails and date boys.

The guys who dropped to play football or soccer or baseball.

And me.

I was hurt, at first when he said it, I was not expecting to hear that, I knew, oh how I knew, like you know when you love someone but they can’t or won’t love you back, I knew that I was not first chair material.

But.

Fuck.

Not even third?

That hurt.

Then.

He stopped.

He looked down at me as I straddled the chair with my cello laying against my leg, took off his horn rimmed glasses and polished them absent-mindedly with his shirt tail, “but you will always have a place in an orchestra Carmen, always, you have something that an orchestra desperately needs, you have heart.”

I had tears in my eyes when he told me that.

I have tears in my eyes now.

“You won’t be first chair, but Carmen, you will play, you will have a job, you can make a career out of this, you can, you have soul and passion and heart and no orchestra can survive without that.”

He tucked his shirt in, put his glasses on his nose and ran his hands through his hair, it was a wild nest of just beginning to fade red curls that on a lessor man or a slightly different face would have called to mind Bozo the clown, instead of this passionate, eccentric, oddball man full of handsome charm and charisma.

“I’m going to talk to your parents again, see if maybe we can’t figure something out,” he padded to the front of the room in his sock feet, he had a habit of conducting in his socks, and took the music off the podium, “scat kiddo, get to your next class.”

He did have a conference with my mom and step father.

It was for naught.

I lost the cello.

But I did not lose the joy.

I did not lose the love.

I did not lose my heart.

It broke open.

Got bigger.

It got some more love on.

Tonight it overflows with it.

And.

I am not sorrowful for that loss.

Rather.

I am grateful for the time I got to have with the cello.

It was a blessing.

Grateful for all the gifts in my life.

All of them.

I am the luckiest girl in the world.

I am.

I am.

Happy.

Joyous.

Motherfucking.

Free.