Loitering ghost

 

He was just loitering outside the garage door. I said whoever you are come back later,
he looked up from the can which he was now pacing toward.
"Hey kid Can't you see I'm busy kicking this can."
I told him to find some other garage door to hang around outside of.
He kicked the can this time moving it meters down to the neighbors garage door. Finally this would get this old bum away from my garage door. He just whistled "swwweeeww".

"If I'm not touching your garage door, why do you care? I'm not even on your pavement and you are out here on a tuesday night worried that I'm kicking around some can."

I turned to face him straight on the wind seemed to blow right through him. Then I said I would prefer to know that there were no street people around the front of my house.

"Well aren't you the neurotic." I began to notice more and more the subtle bluish light aura around the man. I pretended not to hear him.

He said "who are trying to be out here, do you think you are rich, are you supposed to be succesful?"
I told him I planned to get established and set myself up well.

"so you weren't enough and currently are not enough?"
I said I just didn't have enough. I told him I felt I've always been enough. Not convinced at my own affirmation.

"So why tell me this in a panic?"
I told him that I wasn't panicking I just wanted some sort of security for the future.

"So you need a substitute for parents?"

I asked him, why the hell I was explaining all of this to him.

"Well I'm just ghost so you tell me." He replied empty questioning face.

And there it was, I was communicating with a ghost.
But i wasn't speaking out loud I was telepathically saying it all through to him, or he was stealing my responses straight from my head. But my lips didn't open, even so, I said that he must be someone important.

"You'd love that wouldn't you? You'd give yourself a trophy just to be lucky enough to be asssociated with a dead gone somebody. A historic ghost outside your residence, how special!"

I asked him if he would tell me who he was. He jeered an opened grin.
"You think you are a no one but that someday you can become a someone. is that right?"

I told him that he must have it all figured out, despite having been kicked out of heaven, hell or the next little hamster wheel God would have us rolling around on.

He chuckled, "So you planned out your whole life and even planned out how the afterlife would be, speculating about what's got me here derelict infront of your very house."
 
I told him right there and then that my head did it automatically. That my mind was always busy with the future. He spat and kicked a stone that skipped across the bumpy pavement, hit the curb, looked up again and said the following.

"You can't plan jack shit, most of what you got in your life you got through luck. You chalk it up to skill and strategy and all that stupid planning. You go around handing out advice to anyone who will listen about the merits of your efforts. Haughty and all self proud like you are something special, yet under all that big act, you believe you are a no one. You want everyone to take up the same lame mediocre approach you have, the noone becoming a someone."

I nursed my chin and let the ghost continue his tirade.

"You chew on that same leftover piece of fat thrown to you in the form of experiences, favoritism, family support and finanical aid. Imagine the amount of pretending you had to do to convince yourself you really earned everything you have, that your ineffective planning and strategizing has made any difference. And in your void of real talent you reached out to others who helped you build something.
Then you opened your garage door like a right trotten oaf, and started unloading on the ghost of a man who lived decades ago, now completely abandoned to walk the earth forever. Coming upon schmucks like you every time especially tuesday night."

I nodded at him. And asked him if he had any other witty speeches.

"Sure do, common losers are easy to come by. But for people who come from families like yourself it's difficult to lose. Look at the biggest losers in your family. Out of over fifty relations there are one or two real losers, paupers and bingers, people who have squandered their wealth,  but who still manage to convince the majority of them that they are okay. And the many overachievers who were given the benefit of the same conditioning. All walking around on the earth thinking the same line of bullshit you are."

I said to him that he was real creative for a ghost.

"The worst of it is when I look through your windows at you while you are watching the news and see you all denigrating the indigent."

I questioned him and asked what he was doing looking in my windows. I asked him if all ghosts that were banned from the ethereal realms were sent to haunt productive humans.
He laughed out loud.

"People with serious problems don't see us."

 

 

The cleanest guide

 A glass of water the cleanest
blessed water, taken from the well
A smooth Tunisian city garden
a shrine where love exists

take away our bragging and uncertainty
our shame and and wrath
give us that water
that deep true value

keep us in the entourage of of goodness
temperature and kind words keep us giddy and relaxed
encourage us in that fine breeze dustless and mild
tempting us soothing us 

Shift us toward the cool shade where our true spirits peel off
to recognize us and fraternize with us like humming friends
Be so patient like the desert is with us as we continue idiotic
despite the blessings and good advice

shine for us you Tunisian city garden
men like us as vulgar and distracted as camels
shine so well through wherever you are
like blessed water across our foreheads

I squeezed in a trip to Unde Roven

 I was unpacking my bags
It had been a trip underneath a refridgerator
Under an oven with less than a centimeter 
between the floor and it's bottom

That's where I spent my vacation
atleast it was warm even if it was narrow
I didn't quite fit in and ended up feeling squashed
I got back and took my bags upstairs

I unpacked my big suitcase
On the second story of my box I mean my dream
No, I mean my house this big old long house
I was a box within a box within a box

everything inside was mine so tightly packed
without a voice but still screaming to get out
to untidy the floor with an odd mix of clean and dirty
was that really me clean and dirty? really?

had I done a good job job of hiding it?
Probably not, a few teenage cockroaches snobbed me
from those few days I spent under the oven
jeering at my tight clothes and suitcase

But they were free to forage high class crumbs
To mock me and the queues of ants right next to me
oh what a relief to be back home again as a rustic human
wobbly in ambition, competence and the ability to unpack

Tagarel

 The parrot echoing it's cackle from upon the power line
Declaring it's presence bombastically to the whole street
It seemed to be really saying something, not just greeting
talking about the houses and how they were different from the forest

Its beady eyes and hooked beak were as sarcastic as it's cackle and screech
Never before was there such a conceited animal bragging and preaching
of it's miraculous and god given ability to embrace the air and fly
They always came in couples, preening one another tenderly and sly

The parrot clicked and squeaked as if it were a machine
in to monitor the surroundings and disapprove of them

Hazel green

 That pale green that gets lit up by the electric soul somewhere closer to that sweet pumping heart
two eyes that stirred with that light a certain curiosity and potential to focus in
The tanned body that continued for the rest of her dulce de leche to observe
I purposely gaze off in the other direction as it all pulls me in

All of us drag some quality along with us from when we were children
a certain pronunciation of a word or strange way of sitting or walking
arousing details that tell a story that mesmerizes people like me
who lose that internal fight between goodness and curiosity

Hopefulness and disappointment imagine these as simple currencies
traded between men and women who can't front up to their feelings
Burning off the top layers of their impulse only to have them regrow 
starving the strange desire only to have it illuminate like her eyes

Grandson entitled grandson

 Grandson took up an apartment in the city
A friend of a cousin letted it to him unwittingly
He would go from his mummy to becoming a student
The peak of his traits most impulsive and imprudent 

he couldn't cook he wouldn't even clean
The volume of his music was loud and mean
The complaints mounted up patience wore thin
But grandson wouldn't change he just grinned

Grandson learned how he was special me me me
gifts and treats and total absence of responsibility
In his mind he had done no wrong he had no clue
even as he was reminded by his much older nephew

Grandson had been spoiled for years more than a few
He told the owner of the house and any who'd listen
to fuck themselves he would never wash dishes
he was a friendly lad and thought himself slick

So he lost the deposit on the place, some had predicted
His eyes wouldn't agree to the words he read... " you are evicted"

What a bully that Loquat tree is

The morning was mildly windy yet very sunny and bright. A young man in his late teens had just rode up quite a steep incline to the park. His face was tensed as he finished those last rotations of the pedals. He didn't bother stopping at the intersection and continued to ride directly across the road to the park. To his delight the twelve foot high loquat tree had ripe fruit(nespera in Brazil). His face went from a burdened tenseness to beaming with hope, he leaned his bike on one side of the tree, and walked around to the other.  
 
He reached up and grabbed the branch with bracts of yellow fat loquat plums. He had to stretch his whole body upward as far as it would go from tip toes to extended shoulder joints. Now he would get his reward. He had made the timely and lucky discovery of the tree before anyone else.
Something stung the ball of his foot. The open flip flop sandle was of course exposed. Perhaps an ant, not the small harmless ones, no, the tropical ones closer to the size of a spider with jaws the size of their own body. Maybe it was a scorpion!
The branch he was holding down with his left hand shot out, flicking upward at an accelerating speed.
The side of the branch was moving faster than his instinct to avoid it.
It came up hitting him with an abrupt yet subtle bash, then badly scratched the side of his face as it slid back to it's original upward position.

He momentarily held his stinging face. He cursed out loud, then stopped suddenly putting his hand down from his cheek. Then as if a wasp had stung him on his behind, rose stiftly and turned in panic, surveying the park around him, checking to see if there were any witnesses to what he possibly deemed a rather shameful little attempt to get fruit that turned into a spectacled faux pas.
There was an older man and his daughter walking their dog, infact too close to have missed the unfortunate occurrence. He felt his face redden despite his brain's consent. The daughter hid her smirk and pretended to be talking to her dog. Her father looked directly at the young man, not with derision but with an acknowledgement that he had seen it. They neutrality of the father's face was unnerving. was this a man who could be laughing on the inside?

The older man and his daughter walked out of sight. The young man swung his arm angrily toward the tree like an mma fighter several times. Purposely not hitting it. As if to affirm he could control something even if it wasn't the tree branch. But his face didn't lose that look of complaint. Like he had been wronged by something ill-intentioned. His theatrics were more to relieve the anguish of looking like a clown infront of strangers. People he hadn't met and perhaps would never see again in his life. He walked his bike to a little alley next to the construction site. That day as he hauled sand, stones and cement he wondered if the daughter of the man had infact been smirking.
That the look of acknowledgement on the father's face wasn't simply that it had taken place, but as an admission that his daughter had found it excrutiatingly hilarious and that they would probably keep it in the laughing bank for weeks to come. loquats never seemed to taste the same after that.