Rituals I Can't Live By

  The air is guilty of humidity, and I have not loved enough, I say in my best Gerry Mulligan almost blue impersonation. Do I make such melody or am I just a wheezing-buzzing, Koo-coo Kazoo? If anything,  I'm only a beach blanket stiff in the sun. I don't rewind much, or flip through memory books, but I do long for a time when life was revealing and friends, not this Social-Medium, were Real. True Socialists of emotions, trusted curators of Psyche. ‘All for one, one for all,’  we laughed,  retreating to the car while you stood out in the wind smiling like a freezing Archimedes after the Feat.  You discovered your "Eureka!" We  settled  for sputtering  heat    and   watered-down coffee

  Dropping from a clifftop, short-winged sea plane settles on the surface, then flies under foamy waves. Some say he's too silly to be true, but the Puffin, smiling like a Toucan, replies, "Who are you?"   I think he is  a confused tourist whose Miami flight  took him straight  into Arctic exile. Don't be fooled. The Puffin is a dogged one, a tough little trooper, dodging Dark Lords of the sky, racing Behemoths of the Deep for a beak full of sprat, capelin, herring, and cod to sustain his family, two dozens trips,  one after the next, dawn till sunset, an Odyssey  only Homer could write

  Come to me when the descending sun throbs like a beating heart among the trees. It is a tease finite like driving by a stand of jasmine in July. You are the honey I taste at sunset, in the mind's eye, intertwined, we are a montage of arms, lips, legs, groans, moans, kisses, perfumed by pungent cinnamon recollections  I remember long after the earth glides into night on quiet          black                 wings