Rituals I Can't Live By

  The air is guilty of humidity, and I have not loved enough, I say in my best Chet Baker almost blue impersonation. Do I make such melody or am I just a wheezing-buzzing, Koo-coo Kazoo? If anything,  I'm a beach blanket stiff in the sun, not rewinding much, flipping through memory books, longing 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

  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 tourist, confused, whose wrong flight   flew him into Arctic exile. Don't be fooled. The Puffin is a dogged one, a tough little trooper, racing Dark Lords of the sky, dodging Snipers of the Deep for a beak full of sprat, capelin, herring, or cod, flapping madly to Olympian heights on stunted seaplane wings to sustain his family without complaint. Only then, as they sleep, will he dream of Ithaca’s distant shores

  Come to me when the descending sun throbs like a beating heart among the trees. Is it 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