Kitchen Goddess

I dream of you standing
in the light of the windows,
I see it caress your face and know
the heat of this solitary kitchen
will transform my heart to hearth

Dream of Sambalpuri Shankha

Strings drone, tabla booms,
Sari unwinds, silk on hands,
Taste of masala

Kissing the Ocean

Thunder cracked the sky along the coast, stirring Colin from a fitful nap in the palm shade over the veranda.  The sweet smell of rain mixed with the mineral tang of ocean breeze.  Colin breathed deep and thought once more of the taste of her mouth.

Rain.  His memories of Lily always seemed to coalesce around rain.  Thunderstorms were always bittersweet, having met her in one and lost her in another.  The weather in his self-imposed place of exile whipsawed his heart like the wind abused the palm trees.  Still, it was where his heart wanted to take root in sand and sea.

Colin stood up from the rickety chair in which he had been napping.  He shuffled across the porch overlooking the bay below.  The horizon to the south was stained with bruise-colored clouds on a fast clip towards the village.  He tilted his head back as the first fat drops began to fall.  He close his eyes and swayed in the wind, mouth open to catch the rain.

Her lips, he recalled, had always tasted like rain.  The first kiss she had bestowed upon him had happened in a sudden storm that had caught them walking up the avenue away from the harbor.  He had been talking on some forgotten subject when the wind gusted and the sky went form azure to pewter in seconds.  They had drawn close together in a vain attempt to share the newspaper he held over their heads as a shield.

Suddenly, she leaned in and kissed him.  They had ended up braced against the ochre-colored wall of a bodeguita, liplocked amongst crates of mangoes and tamarinds.  They shop keeper looked on bemusedly, then shrugged and went back to tidying up.

Colin remembered gasping and in his dazed state asking Lily if she wanted to share some fruit.  He had picked up the first thing he could find, which to their shared humor turned out to be passion fruit.


He smiled at the memory, rain trickling down his face to mix with the slow tears leaking from eyes he feared to open.  The roar of thunder mixed with the hiss of rain and surf.  Colin brought his head down, dizzy, and opened his eyes.  The sea lay before him, a grand sheet of liquid jade sprinkled with silver.  The water swelled and rolled in the wind, and his heart seized up to see it.


Thunder brought rain, and the taste of her mouth.  She was gone, he knew, watching the sea in its restless glory become a mirror of her soul.

Language Barrier

Bard I am not, when the language
is love and the talk is of amour
Words I know, having read the dictionary
but phrases I cannot string together

Homily on love, you ask?
I think not, god, the doubt
The dizzying want, the parted lips,
Wine turning into vinegar

Knowing a little of the language,
Is it worse than none at all?
To speak of passion, hurl an insult,
Yet not truly touch the heart?

I said I am not a poet, nor can I sing,
at least not well, hunched in the dark
hovering over the tattered hymnal, breathing.
Arias the shadows of my inamorata

Goddess Belly: On Your Knees, Boy!

“I don’t write songs about girls anymore,
I have to write songs about women”

-“I’m An Adult Now” by The Pursuit of Happiness

It is fair to say that I have always been flummoxed by women, ever since I was a little gumbo many years ago. More precisely, flummoxed by females, since some of the people layin’ the flummox on me were girls. I am reasonably certain that this sort of flummoxing has been happening to other males ever since, well, since there have been ‘pointers and setters’. I got to ruminating (oh, no, not again..) on this the other day as I contemplated the ‘Venus of Willendorf’ (henceforth known as VOW) in the middle of a daydream about a girlfriend from long ago. She looks like this (VOW, not the girlfriend):

Please, take a moment to ponder. (hums ‘Baby Got Back’…) Weird and cool, no? There are a lot of theories about what the statue represents, like fertility goddess, a toy or even prehistoric pornography! The one thread that really caught my attention is the notion that it represents a goddess, worshipped by males; something to do with the ‘mystery’ embodied by the female, in the mind of the prehistoric male. Although some would say “Is there really a difference in the modern man?”

No argument from me on that one! The ladies have always been mysterious to me, have always had a sway over me that I couldn’t explain. At first I wasn’t aware I was being ‘hyp-no-tised!’, I just knew that in the presence of females in general and some females in particular that I wanted to be around them. As a kid, there were three cousins in particular that could get me all flustered. I’ll call them MJ/S/D for short. They were all older than me, and at family get-togethers I remember thinking they were the prettiest ladies I had ever seen. And to me they still are, although MJ sadly enough, passed away a few years back. (I really miss her big laugh). Plus, this was roughly the same time that Charlie’s Angels was on the tube, and I had some serious crushes on Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith (oddly, Farrah Fawcett?...meh):

My cousins had a bit of the Kate/Jaclyn vibe going on. That sort of thing, at the time, had the power to make me get real confused and quiet. And I had no clue back then just how dumbstruck I really was. When it came to the ridiculous, Neanderthal antics many of my male teenage peers engaged in to attract the ladies, I was outclassed. I could barely compete. I liked the females too much as people, was too shy, couldn’t bring myself to do it. As my general lack of steady girlfriends would confirm. It occurred to me much later that a lot of those guys were acting like typical alpha-male knuckleheads because they were probably either 1) not very self-aware or 2) were even more frightened than I was at the power girls held over us lads.

“She’ll pull it out on the river – she’s gussied up like sin,
You got jack all squat – you you’re a violin
And you’re gonna get played…”

-“The Fix Is On” by Peter Mulvey

So you probably see where this was going to go. This problem, if I could call it that, persists until this very day. From the females who knew me as a kid, to my first girlfriend G. in junior high and my last girlfriend S. before I went to college, to the short flings in college before I met the woman who went from girlfriend to fiancé to The Spouse, and even now with my beautiful Wee Lass: I am a violin, I have been played. Truth be known, now it doesn’t bother me as much. I slowly became aware of this tendency in college and I learned how to work around it. I figured out something, I guess. I managed to get married and eventually fathered three kids!

But I never really figured out how to defuse the reflex. It gets me every now and then. Case in point, the video for Mysterious Ways by U2: it has a belly dancer. A really, really nice belly dancer. When the video first came out, I would see it and DING! Stop, drop and slack-jawed. Every single damn time. I hadn’t seen it in years until just the other day as I was goofing around on YouTube, I stumbled across it: deer meets headlights, around minutes 2 and 3:



As Bono explains:

“…Let her talk about the things you can't explain.
To touch is to heal, to hurt is to steal.
If you want to kiss the sky, better learn how to kneel
On your knees, boy!”

Goddess, I already am.