Mood Swings

The grass tickles down my spine, nothing but my thin tank top to playfully fend off the blades. It's warm now, warm like it never was. With nothing but a stone cold soldier behind me I feel the sun play upon my face. And I know that feeling of hands tiptoeing the contours of my features, I can almost feel it now. But heat is denser than air, but nowhere near as tightly bound as the molecular structure of human contact. Still, the grass blades beside me begin to bend. In honor? In fear?

But I can tick back the clock thanks to my moleskin full of photographic memories and poems meant to be told aloud. The air is electric now, blades contagious with life. The sun isn't feeling me at all, its celebrating. The statue is gallantly posing and its as if the whole world is spinning around this one spot at this one frame in time. Do what you will, turn me into your next stop-motion project and you will see. Smile plastered to my face, restless hands no longer empty. Remember this. Record this, because these moments are fleeting.

I feel the suns rays reaching back out to full the gap, and I know it's gone.

Now its happening, something is coming. Ants pour out the folds of their leafy green battle fields, and the sun is not just reaching now, its groping, pulling at every inch of clothing it can spare because then the eyes set in, and they begin to flood ot only the hollow beside me, but my own cavities as well. Drowning in this puddle of sorrow and regret, I look back at my stone-cold soldgier, and he's changing as well. No longer posing, he towers with a smirk as to say "I told you so" and a glint in the eyes to match. Well, maybe, or its the sun again.

Where I'm From

The cement floors chilled m toes as I would pad across the infinite room heading as quickly, clumsily as I could to my electric blue Little Tykes swing my daddy had hung from the rafters, a million years above my head. One lopsided hop and I could sit at my throne overlooking the only glass wall suspended before me. With my legs pumping and arms pulling ages before muscle tone would set in, I could adjust the frame on my view of where I am from.

Trees would beg for water but not know which direction to look, branches squinting in the head of the LA sun they would be suffocated by smoggy air and cigarette smoke from woman stealing away the last breath of light in the tree's shade. The woman would smile at no one looking and say, "At least I got here, at least I came."

Her view eye-level at a storefront window would never glimmer in the light or shine in the never-coming rain. Not in her eyes, nor in mine, from up above on my throne, no matter how low i would adjust my shutter speed or how much artificial white light I could spit from my pre-pubescent mind.

"Bienvenido," a dim sign read, its hard manmade material standing strongly before both of our eyes. Manmade, she would remind herself as her dry hands materialized around the plastic rosary that clung to her chest.

With just an inking of something and a dash of pain, she would gaze up past the scrawling branches through their cries, and her eyes would meet mine through the shiny glass window a million years above her head.

This is where I'm from.