Amorphous Playmate. {poetry}
{Photo via Tumblr}
When we first met, my amorphous playmate, a few years older than myself, lingering in the amber lighting, of my mother’s dining room, where all my thoughts flooded from crayon to paper, from doodles to words, you led me even then to gardens of apple blossoms, and sometimes utopian visions of unicorns.
Mostly, though, you led me to trouble. Where real people slapped my writing fingers. When you were the one who wronged them: stumbling through ideals, drowning in perceptions, telling stories in grade school. Of talking alligators in sewers. Telling stories in seventh grade, of principals moonlighting as flashers. Telling stories in high school, of math teachers masturbating to playboy.
Telling stories in college of cannibalistic prostitutes eating their johns. You always came to me, smelling of the street, of sin, of freeway flowers of muck and twist, and still I loved you.
And still I see the little spark of the devilish child in your smile when you flash by. From time to time I see your youth. These days, you’re a quiet wife looking after her children. One hundred and fifty of them, every year. We toil in paper kitchens and burn each other and cry. Make masterpieces but never make time to celebrate.
We sleep together clothed, and you haven’t ripped through me for so long now, like you used to with your six inch knife and vampire fangs. When I was 20 and you slung the shit of Allen Ginsberg at me in your rage, Glaring wickedly with comic-book-hero muscles. You came to my defense with every heartbreak, held me in the arms of your song brought me to blue skies of youth. Promises of the whole world in bright shining gold, tossed up in the endless periwinkle sky, and told me to reach for it all till I tired and slept.
Beneath the paper moon and dreamed of paper dancers in pleated skirts and low cut shirts. In places like Cuba and Heaven. You took me places. You changed your form. Your face, your presence. Amorphous again, carrying me and my insecurity, tiptoeing. And scaring me when you become a belly dancer moving violently, swaying sweetly — melting, cinnamon skin.
So I forgot about you. As if we took wedding vows and stopped going on dates.
But when I see you again, the venom still drips from your fangs. You are young again Summoned from the black earth. By the rhythmic drums. Smelling like the naked trees and seaweed, like war and peace, like a battlefield victory.
*****
Lana Nasrawi is a tattooed, Chuck-wearing high school English teacher and a life-long nerd. When she sheds the Clark Kent persona, she is a water-worshipping adventurer chasing swell with her eight-year-old girl wonder. She keeps it real with her. She is a competitive outrigger canoe paddler and has raced inter-island crossings numerous times, including the treacherous 43-mile Kaiwi Channel. But teaching teens is what really makes her a badass.
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