I.
Once upon a time in Disney World
I decided I could paint my fortune.
One-eyed blinking constants of the floating head.
Behold! The great Oz who grants haphazard
wishes for falling stars and sometimes me.
When I was kiln-baking fortune cookies
and engraving “voice” in tiny crooked letters,
You were already behind the blank face of the Daruma
on His left, there, slightly behind the white eye.
The blind eye.
The glaze cracked, chipped in my pocket
against the sea-hewn edges of my rotten lucky penny.
I was only left part of an “o” and “ice.”
All this and a half-green half-white rabbit foot
on a brown, not gold, chain.
One-eyed blinking constants that kept Future
in the moistened white glare, set back in the socket,
They were just some of the many things you used to call
Bull-shit.
II.
It’s a dusty road.
When I lost count of the telephone poles at 52,
you reminded me about the weeks until the Chinese New Year.
We were only excited about eggrolls, sweet, sour,
and Mama Fu. Well,
because that babe of a waitress really knew how to walk,
and make eggrolls, and deliver fortune cookies that became more than slips of paper.
Since we can see the horizon here,
we don’t stand still anymore.
It hasn’t been the Year of the Dragon for going on 20 years.
Only climbing to touch the top of the 52 foot star,
you’re surprised when I come home with a new number
And it’s 66 and it’s a highway and it’s not you.
It’s a dusty road.
But God, how did I forget narrow mountain roads where coming down slow is a Jubilee
of leafy orange-pink lollipop rays that you’ve hidden from me this long.
Cheated heart, you bet your bottom dollar.
And I can’t believe that you do this to me now
when the Western Witch’s glass of sand holds
2 weeks, 4 days.
III.
McDonald’s fed them so much garbage
they’re telling us McA’s McB’s and McC’s
In the same summer when my alphabet was
Tall, Grande, Venti
I saw the sunrise enough times to know that you
didn’t cater to them, and that made me happy
because
and
so you could send me postcards
from an espresso milkshake coffee-shop
where they only deal in small or large.
They used to tell us that Nostalgia made fools of men.
Nostalgia!
Janus taught us otherwise so that my Oz
has 3 eyes and only sees the past clearly.
It’s why I fell for kitschy gift shops that had
photo frame snow globe where I could put that picture of you and me
in January
IV.
Jubilee.
There is nothing else.
V.
And when I wanted to be a big shot
your gently curving map always brought me back to pollen valley dust bowls.
See, Dr. Fate and the Justice Society of
caged the Spectre so I could deal with all the voodoo garbage on my own.
“Your future is as boundless and lofty as the heavens.”
That’s something I carried in a paper crane jacket for
52 weeks, even though the ink had long worn off and I’d stop believing it anyway.
I’m struck by how all the best futurists are super heroes.
Tony Stark and the Avengers chasing Ultron and the horizon in the Quinjet.
The pulsing Quasar of that constellation is the only closure we need in that gutter.
What I found out, was that no matter how many crises,
or cranes,
or coffees,
or comics,
Heaven isn’t that far away.
And all the future ever seems to do is click my heels together for me,
three times.
VI.
Jaclyn.
Phenomena.
Narwhales are the unicorns of the sea but I always had to give you a hard time about that
because, damn, your seafood was awful,
Red Lobster at best, and that just don’t cut it.
But because my Daruma doesn’t see so good, I didn’t know that the desert was worse
and sea scallops meant green chile and sopapillas.
It’s not filled with rib cages and steer skulls.
Just scrub and dust and sand and the Western Witch.
It doesn’t have that mountain you can drive up,
look over the edge,
crane your neck,
and see your house with other houses and green trees
Orion on the night of the lunar eclipse.
I remember green.
I abandoned art class and that one tertiary color
in favor of red, blue, and Momaday.
Rachel pretended she was on cocaine
while that other girl was actually putting that stuff up her nose
and Professor Carr was overdosing on her own loneliness and puppy dog tails.
I never mixed my own secondary colors because it was so much easier pulling greens
from the box of crayons.
VII.
The Daruma is weighted on the bottom.
Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down
It’s the releasing of a jar of July fireflies,
and folding 1000 paper cranes,
and pocketing the fortunes of every Chinese restaurant in town.
It’s the prayer flags that tatter in your room when the silver fan was left on high.
It’s the tea you drink religiously, jasmine flowers plucked at midnight.
It’s the way the moving forward makes you wish you had two January faces
so you don’t have to worry what you’d leave behind.
It’s a lucky penny, broken by seashells and horseshoe crabs,
and the way new year’s resolutions fade and all you’re left with is a right eye.
Daruma looks straight at me and says that you aren’t part of the equation.
And that your “bull shit” is only in the one painted eye of my little red beholder.
For 52 weeks, Daruma reminded me that all the good fortune in the world wouldn’t
help me find the bucket of water and confront His elusive left eye.
Daruma, and Jubilee, and Me.
Blinking. Squinting. Not seeing enough of anything.
Daruma and Me.
Him. Standing stoically, maybe wobbling a little.
Daruma.
Two eyed, unblinking constants that tell us fortune is only endurance.
God’s honest Truth.
VIII.
I crashed my kite.
The sea was angry, my friend,
and an octopus swallowed the Wright Brothers Flyer whole.
Supple, slender, especially delicious tentacles snapped my kite string.
Canyons and ice cream are poor replacements
for Mountains and ice cream,
but even now, with eagles and crows swirling overhead,
I think that the sky behind
Mysticism.
I’m waiting for the decisions to be made for me.
And when I’m angry because they have already been made,
I always have to question the jar of India ink.
The short and sad answer is that
I don’t know what I know.
I believe, and since that’s enough,
I’m writing a script about a chef who finds love and God through Pad-Thai.
And since that’s enough,
I think the kite never mattered
and all that remains is the
I’ll wait for the fireflies,
watermelon
the summer honeysuckles
before I decide whether I’ve earned a pupil.
Whether I earned the resiliency of fortune.
While the bristles of the brush dry out
and harden.
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