Perfect Love

Do you know what would be perfect? What would be perfect is to be loved with the depth and intensity of a grandmother loving her grandchild, to be made love to with the passion of a new lover who possessed the familiarity and skill of an old lover. That would be about a perfect love. I could stand me about a lifetime of that kind of love. ~GH

Beauty and Love

Beauty and Love are as body and soul.

Beauty is the mind, LOVE is the diamond.

They have been together since the beginning of time.

Side by side, step by step.

~ Rumi

Light

In your light I learn how to love.

In your beauty, how to make poems.

You dance inside my chest,

where no one sees  you,

but sometimes I do,

and that light becomes this art.

 ~ Rumi (as interpreted by Coleman Barks

The Lute Will Beg

THE LUTE WILL BEG

You need to become a pen

In the Sun´s hand.

We need for the earth to sing

Through our pores and eyes.

The body will again become restless

Until your soul paints all its beauty

Upon the sky.

Don´t tell me, dear ones,

That what Hafiz says is not true,

For when the heart tastes its glorious destiny

And you awake to our constant need

for your love

God´s lute will beg

For your hands.

Hafiz

Guest Poet: Pablo Neruda

Friends Forever

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I love my friends neither with
my heart nor with my mind.
Just in case heart might stop, Mind can forget.
I love them with my soul.
Soul never stops or forgets.
  ~~ Rumi

NOTE: Promotion has ended. Special gift for ChickenScratches readers: Today only, (beginning at 12:00 Pacific), "Bicycle Charlie and the Cats - A Short Story" is free. I'd love to hear what you think of it. Consider leaving a review. :)

http://www.amazon.com/Bicycle-Charlie-Cats-Short-ebook/dp/B00EZGSRE6/ref=la_B00EYVHBFS_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1379719213&sr=1-4
[Tomorrow: New Looks]

I Will be Waiting

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I will be waiting here

For your Silence to break

For your Soul to shake

For your Love to wake.

  ~~ Rumi

[Tomorrow: Something Strange About You]

Tommy Watts - Part II

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[Continued from yesterday. To read the first part, click here].

I’d somehow finagled the right to check tickets at the door of prom, and so I got to wear a formal gown for the first time. Mine was sleeveless, with an empire waist that fit snugly under my breasts and flowed freely from that level down. The lower section was a fairly bright lemon yellow, and the upper part was white. There was a gathered ruffle, white trimmed with yellow edging, that ran down the middle of the front of the dress.

My left upper arm was easily twice as large as my right arm due to an allergic reaction to a tetanus shot I’d taken the night before after falling into a sewer before a softball game. Not only was it swollen, it had turned a bright, angry red as well. So between the deep tan I had from playing tennis and softball outdoors every day, and the tetanus shot reaction glowing crimson against the pristine white of my prom gown, I stood out.

Tommy could have attended prom with me for free – admission for two was one of the perks I earned – but he wanted no part of such things, and I agreed to his alternative plan. We would walk from the Civic Center to Shoney’s Colonial on the Boulevard, and have a milkshake and spend some time together talking.

He showed up in neat blue jeans, a white t-shirt, and blue jean jacket. I thought he looked like a million bucks. We strolled hand-in-hand the couple of blocks to Shoney’s. Because it was a Saturday night, the place was packed with a waiting line that snaked out the front doors and around part of the building. It was like that every weekend night if there was a concert, or a prom or other activity, or even if there wasn’t; Shoney’s was a destination in itself back then.

I expressed concern we would have to wait for hours and suggested we just go home. Tommy wouldn’t hear of it. He led me by my hand and we wove through the crowd until we reached the hostess. Tommy leaned forward and took her hand. He bent down and whispered in her ear, and she giggle and blushed, then looked down at her hand. Her jaw relaxed a little, the smile gone, and she stared into the palm of her hand. Immediately, her hand clamped shut, and she looked up at Tommy who by then had moved us away from the hostess

Pretty as you please, she called out “Watts, party of two?”

I opened my mouth to ask how, and Tommy shushed me. He tugged my arm so hard I nearly lost my balance, and before I knew it, we had been seated in a booth – a booth!  When there was just the two of us in that crowded Saturday night restaurant – near the back of the dining room.

We ordered a single chocolate milkshake and chatted about my adventure the night before. Tommy was so sweet and encouraging. He made me feel as if it hadn’t been the end of the world, and by the time our treat arrived, I had forgotten about my sore arm and wounded pride. We shared the milkshake, sucking up the thick chocolate ice cream through two straws like Archie and Betty at the Chok’lit Shoppe.

We continued chatting after we finished the shake, and Tommy began to fold a five-dollar bill into intricate shapes. It seemed random to me, sort of an absent-minded activity to occupy his hands, and I assumed he was curtailing his boundless energy in order to be able to sit still.

Finally, we decided it was time to leave and let someone else have our booth. Tommy called our waitress over. He rolled what seemed to be a die across the table. It was the five-dollar bill, folded into a perfect cube shape with the “5” on one face. “This is for you. That was one tasty milkshake you made; thank you,” he said and smiled. She beamed from the wide grin that spread across her face.

He and I strolled hand-in-hand the mile and a half to my house. Although he kissed me very sweetly – reverently but passionately as well – his hands never wandered off the hardtop. There was no surreptitious brushing of the back of his knuckles, or nudging of a breast, no accidental butt touch, nothing. Tommy respected my boundaries without exception. I loved Tommy Watts and although he wasn’t the white collar upstanding citizen my parents wanted me to end up married to, he seemed to be the perfect boy as far as I was concerned. He was smart, funny, clever, kind, talented, entertaining, and he respected me in a way I was unaccustomed to.

Everything was fine until the day that summer I decided to hide and surprise him. ~~GH

[Tomorrow: Conclusion]

Tommy Watts - Part I

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I was almost fifteen when I fell in love with Tommy Watts. He wasn’t much taller than me and usually I was attracted to taller guys, but his personality shone so brightly that I couldn’t help but be fascinated. He had strawberry blonde hair and a mustache, and facial skin so red he always looked as if he’d just ducked out of the grip of some mother hell-bent on scrubbing an invisible spot of dirt from his cheeks. And his eyes! Tommy Watts had eyes the color of cornflowers.

He was muscular in the way that not-so-tall men have – that Irish fisticuffs champion physique. I used to picture him in waist-pants and leather lace-up boots with a wide belt, his arms curled, fists balled, ready to box like pictures I’d seen of men from the late 19^th century. Tommy was always ready for come-what-may. He might not have been the biggest guy out there, but a girl knew she was in good hands when she was with Tommy Watts.

He was as athletic as a monkey. There was nothing I knew of that Tommy Watts couldn’t do with his body. He could jump into the air and twist around three complete revolutions before he landed facing you. He could do handstands, backflips, handstands that turned into backflips, backflips that turned into handstands. He could stand on his head. He could backflip and land standing on his head. The fact that he ended up making his living scrambling around in trees as a forester speaks to his athleticism. 

One of my favorite feats of gymnastics involved him flipping onto the roof that covered the back doors to the alley at my high school. But he did it with flare! He faced out into the alley, back turned toward the building’s wall. He’d jump up and grab onto the roof’s edge as if he were going to do a chin-up. Then he slowly extended his legs out, body straight and stiff as a board, until he was perpendicular to the roof. Magically, he’d keep his body perfectly straight and continue completing the arc until he was upside-down, face down, legs pointed to the sky. Then he would speed up and finish off the pendulum swing by landing on the roof on his feet. I once saw him accomplish this routine with a cast on his right arm. Yes, somehow he did it one-armed.

Tommy Watts had deadly aim with a rock. He would take fifty-cent bets that he could hit a specific window in a building with a rock. He never once had to pay off in all the time we spent together. The summer of 1972, he broke out every single pane of glass on the Costello Street side of Watts Elementary School (no relation), one fifty-cent bet at a time. That’s a tidy sum.

I will share my best, and worst, memories of Tommy with you. The best involves the day after I fell in a sewer. The worst involves the day I decided to hide and surprise him. ~~GH

[Tomorrow: Tommy Watts, Part II]

I Usta

When I was ten years old, I received a hand-written-in-pencil letter from my great grandmother thanking me for sending her a dollar for her 80th birthday. It was a pretty long letter -- two pages, front and back -- full of laboriously looped and neatly crafted cursive writing.

One line that stuck out and caught my critical third-grade, so-holier-than-thou eye was "when i was a girl, i usta love school." She didn't capitalized the pronoun "I," but what struck me was the made-up word "usta."

For years, I used it (pardon the pun) as a joke: "I usta love school," "I usta --" whatever. The irony of it spoke to me. She usta (again, forgive) *love* school but couldn't spell "used to." I was so cruel, so unkind, so self-sanctimonious, so unforgiving of a woman who had only three years of schooling, lived in a nursing home, didn't really know me except as some far-distant spawn of the spawn of her son, and yet she invested so much time and effort into reaching out and trying to formulate a connection with me.

I usta think I was something special. Now I know I'm not. I hope you will forgive my insensitivity. Thank you, Grandma Hopcroft. 

[Tomorrow: Crapalachia - My Very First Book Review]

Earth Delights

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This is one of my favorite lines from Gibran's body of work. How wonderful to personify Nature and know she loves you so? ~~GH

[Tomorrow: I Usta]

Sometimes I Do

In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art."
  ~~Rumi

[Tomorrow: Ye Are Many]

Mirage of Homage

I'm pretty sure I can't take reading one more collection of words some man has written about his devotion for the woman he loves. Usually, I well up with mudita, but tonight I feel very delicate and tender, raw. I am maybe even a little envious (although envy is fairly foreign to me).

My memory echoes with words which were whispered and even shouted to me, words that I know are now whispered and shouted to another. And I wonder why I'm so far past that section of road now, so far I can't even remember what they sounded like.

I wonder if that place was like the shimmery illusion one sees during summer when the heat rises off the asphalt and everything seems magical for just a moment. Were those words even spoken? If I went back to that spot in time, would I hear them, disembodied, repeating like a scratched record, over and over? ~~GH

[Tomorrow: Give Freely]

Lose Yourself

Whatever happens, just keep smiling and lose yourself in Love. 

        ~~Rumi

[Tomorrow: Mirage of Homage]

This is Not for You

I am so fortunate to be acquainted with many, many talented people. Although I love them all, some are more special to me than others. One such is my good friend Mick Craig. He is multi-talented, and a fine human being besides.

Here is a poem he wrote that made me cry. Not weep, mind you -- cry. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. If you do, check out his blog, A Short Story in 365 Chapters. ~~GH

This is not for you

Don't believe that you were the love of my life
From the first time I kissed you until the day I died

Don't believe that I would have waited all night in the rain for a glimpse of you,
And turned my back on all who love me for one last kiss

Don't believe that after all this time, I still wake in the night
And smell your hair and taste you on my tongue

Don't believe that when I kissed your sleeping lips and woke you
I knew that I was home

Don't believe that I would forgive you anything, give you everything,
Never leave you, betray you or ever make you cry

Don't believe that I would have picked you up again
No matter how often you fell

Don't believe that your eyes made my heart sing
And that now I have no music left

Don't believe that you gave me my greatest joy and my worst despair
And that I lived my life in those few short months with you

Don't believe, though all of it is true
Cross my broken heart.

     ~~Mick Craig

[Tomorrow: Chain of Fools]

For Carol and MLH

A friend of mine has lost her companion of fifteen years. This spoke to me, and although it is far too soon, I wish her the comfort that will eventually be found in treasuring those mem'ries which remain. ~~GH

What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind...

~~William Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood"
[Tomorrow: A Mother’s Prayer for Her Child]

Bird in a House

I want to sing my own song that's all
cried the bird and flew into a wall
there must be some way out he cried
and his desperation echoed down the hall

Just another bird in a house
dying to get out
just another bird in a house
dying to get out

I want to join my own kind that's all
cried the bird and flew into a wall
there must be some way out he cried
and his desperation echoed down the hall

just another bird in a house
dying to get out
just another bird in a house
dying to get out

I'm gonna smash my way out that's all
cried the bird and smashed from wall to wall
there must be some way out he cried
and his desperation echoed down the hall

just another bird in a house
dying to get out
just another bird in a house
dying to get out

I know I feel this way at times -- longing to connect with another bird, my own kind. I feel like such a stranger in a strange land. We all do. This is what makes that connection so ecstatic, so intense, so precious. 

Here's to finding your bird of a feather. May you forever flock together. ~~GH
[Tomorrow: Alienated]

Our Desire

Funny how our perspectives change. We start out wanting a perfect person, perfect physical form, pleasing features, thick hair -- it's all about appearances and physical desire. Then we move to financial security and status for awhile.

Eventually, when it's all said and done, what matters is consideration, compassion. What we really want is someone to hold us, a good back or foot rub, someone to share a meal and talk with, to hear the outpouring of our hearts, to acknowledge our humanity, to accept us. 

When it comes down to it, what we really want is a mommy, with a side of sex. ~~GH
[Tomorrow: Karma]

Treasure Beyond Price

“Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.” 
     ~~ George Sand
[Tomorrow: Momma Update]

Reveal Yourself

“if we want the rewards of being loved, we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.” 
    ~~Tim Kreider
[Tomorrow: A Place You Cannot See]