The Priestess of Morgan Blvd

The Priestess of Morgan Boulavard

Her skin is tough, and wrinkled

like she is  some Mayan woman living

on top of the Andes exposed to wind and sun.

Her arms swing in great half circles,

as she walks along the side of the road,

her cracked lips muttering prayers, or rants,

or maybe spells summoning the loose change

out of the pockets of those of us she

stops in a Stripes parking lot as

we emerge from our cars to buy tacos,

or as we sit on a park bench watching birds.

“Can I have some change? I’m goin’ to K-Mart

to buy some hamburger meat” is her

usual line, and she says it with one

arm extended to you, yellow nails

on her fingers, the palm of her hand cracked,

like an old cement sidewalk.

She walks the same route every day,

as constant and as regular as the tide

or a sunrise, and her walk is metronome steady,

almost unworldly. She moves not sweating

in the heat of the sun, powered by

her madness, her addictions, her fear.

To see her it to feel the world tilt for a moment,

the battles roiling in her brain are visible

in her eyes and so fierce is her need,

it draws you to her like a black hole.

In another age, she would have inspired legends.

She is walking the roads looking for her lover

they would say. She can tell fortunes, but went

mad from looking too far into the future

they would tell their children. You must

give her a quarter or she will spit into the

dust on your car tires causing them to go

flat they would whisper. She might have

been a priestess, instead of the lady at

Stripes who accepts your change while

she looks at the other world she sees

just over your shoulder.

Smoking

 Three months without one and it's still there,

the itch beneath the scab, the nagging urge,

tap-tapping against my molars, and sending my tongue searching.between my lips for

the cotton, paper, and smoke.

The ancient priests knew the value of smoke,

saw the divinity in the ever expanding cloud, traced the prophecies in it's curls, and realized that our poor wingless prayers rode the rising

plumes like hawks gliding on thermal currents, circling their way heavenward.

So don't congratulate me on not smoking.

I have lost my prayers, my ritual, my vespers,

matins, and lauds, the punctuation of my days, the moments of respite, and  the fuel of my future plans. 

It is only the tube-brearhers, carrying their 

life support systems behind them on

two-wheeled carts, struggling across

the vast distance that is the doctor's 

waiting room who keep me from 

the box,  the cellophane, the foil and

the flame.