Arturo and the Cactus Bubble Carnivale

Arturo watched as Corvio and Lorena danced.

“Damn the devil; it is sweltering,” Grandfather muttered. “How I hate days like this… How I hate this place.”

Arturo sat on the warm earth as his grandfather ranted. The boy had spent several minutes playing with a stout, long blade of wild grass, pressing the slender green leaf between his thumbs and puffing away at it until it buzzed and whistled.

The two lovers some 100 feet away swayed under the weight of the horizon-warping sun. Lorena’s black hair danced on the warm Brazilian breeze like tendrils of a richly-rooted plant. Corvio’s fingers ran through the licorice strands as a distant steel drum band pulsed away.

“If you hate this place so much, Grampa, why don’t we leave?” Arturo asked innocently.

A dry laugh escaped from the old man’s striated and bearded face. “When you are poor and old, boy,” he sighed, “your feet magically disappear.”

Arturo became restless and rose to his feet, walking towards the center of the intersection. He walked past the dancing couple, strangely distracted by Lorena’s flashing, unsolicited smile.

A wooden bucket sat just shy of the street corner, worn and faded-brown from sitting in the sun. Slick sheets of soap coated the surface of the still water within. Arturo pulled the strand of grass from his lips, stood up, and walked to the container. As his bare feet scraped against the dry grass kicking up tiny plumes of dusty earth, he curled the long green blade in his fingers into a loop, twisting the bottom until it formed a perfect ring. 

Then the boy dipped the grass ring into the soapy standing water and removed it with a jerk. A rainbow sheen of soap swirled prismatically at the ring’s center. With one puff from his lips, Arturo sent a flurry of bubbles into the waning glow of the dusky air.

Arturo soon followed the swirling mass of shiny globes towards a cactus at the center of the street’s intersection. The government had killed many plants on this patch of land, but spared this one native piece of vegetation. All who gazed on it knew why.

An uncharacteristically slender base stem supported a mass of seven cactus branches, each festooned with blossoms and spines. Reptiles and insects alike gravitated to the organic structure, exploring its vividly-colored blossoms and sharp white barbs. Several honeybees drifted around the scarlet blossoms decorating the cactus’s green framework. All Arturo knew was that the cactus–’seven of hearts,’ his neighbors called it–was a tiny fount of indescribable beauty.

Another film of soap clung to the interior of Arturo’s grass ring. The bees drifted lazily in the air above the alien-beautiful cactus, buzzing slowly but certainly towards the boy’s head. Arturo forcefully exhaled another puff of air through the grass ring, and another fleet of soap bubbles burst forth.

One of the honeybees accelerated forward into the sea of bubbles, until it pierced one of the globes. Instead of bursting to nothingness, the bubble continued to surround and encase the bee hovering wishfully above the cactus blossoms. A lizard, its compound eyes mesmerized by the floating soap globes, began snapping bubbles up with its tongue. Lacquered and armored beetles squirmed methodically along the cactus’s surface.

The bubble-imprisoned bee buzzed directly into Arturo’s surprised face, until its soap prison burst and scattered droplets of moisture about. The boy followed the insect’s progress around his head, watching wistfully as it ascended towards the hot yellow sun.

Unlocked Ocean Vascular Chest of Secrets

The cliffs sat along to my left, slicked by the incoming mist carried surreptitiously by the winter breeze and one ribbon of thin white foam cut across the rolling blue; more blue cerulean maybe

 

skittered above the green of the remaining coastline, frosted decorated by pillows of lazy diaphanous something

Just past the foam and the green blue water the whistle symphony rose; oh my ears and the chorus blanketing the whole of view of time and tide; two people far down the beach

 

melding with the cool saltwater-saturated sand ambling, oblivious to the sound or maybe sculpted by and growing from it

Maybe I dreamt them but did not dream the scarlet.

One rock jutted forth from the waves and foam, and a vermillion cloth bobbed and eddied at its base. Opaque amber seaweeds encircled, threading around the red mass and obscuring its edges. two air pockets at its center caused the crimson to bulge in fulsome curves red bosom or muscle pumping saltwater blood

and the chorus–gulls harmonizing with watery whispers–kept persistently thrumming buzzing purring as I walked into the water immune to the cold engulfing my legs then enveloping my midriff and shoulders. Breeze continued bringing the mist and it clung to my face and lightly stung my open eyes

Floated closer to it, I did; those coils and tubes of sealife forming vessels and arteries around the red silk muscle at the hem of the rock’s skirt and I checked my ocean heart’s pulse

putting hand to it as it beat and the amber veins and tubes threaded through my outstretched fingertips, musky saltiness filling my open head

Because It Sang with alien Taste

How I dream it

Her voice and maybe the way those damned orbs, windows as usual; all round and enveloping,  jettison sadness as

she drags her fingertip across the spiny alien surface; pulp glistens. Nail through skin juice sweet or bitter or vegetative (Russian Roulette of sensory)

threads, pregnant serpents full of sweetness, between my teeth and hers challenge to extract that milky white fiber or satchel of juice from between hers with swipe of my tongue. Lizards—no. Or maybe.

Just her id and mine; the latter stronger now than previous and taking her hand wrapping my arms around licking dew with her shoulder and the smell of her I’ve been there before never tire of it capacity infinite she knows and in time it will open and she’ll arrive too

emphasis on second-to-last two-syllable utterance

Azul

Smear and bitter ink taste but pretty in middle of lip

There is blue at the base of the pen, a coagulated bit of ink-blood neat and rigid and formatted.

In approximately 3/42 of a second I pick away at it. It causes more blue fluid blood hemoglobin to pulse from the freshly-liberated seam.

 

 

The ink—it oozes from the tiny gap, thick and syrupy and sticky viscous like what’s under my skin if what came

out of the vein was tinted and tinctured exactly like the blue vein that stored it.

My fingertips glide together to cherish the texture as it warms and moistens with each pass and alters the appearance of my always-clutching and clusterfucking digits feel

everything and never stop drinking the blue, the cool blue, the deep blue indigo like the scales of some snake all blue; not sky blue. Dark blue with black pearl eyes and flick’ring tongue red.

Bloom

The Clarion Blue Sky, vast and limitless, would not pay attention to anything beneath the mote in its eye its infinite blue eye

but once two months ago it looked down, accidentally, at the angel Bloom. Bloom burst forth from the tree, just one of dozens of  petite sylphs basking  ‘neath Clarion Blue Sky’s inattentive and cold view. But Clarion Blue Sky’s gaze happened downward that day, to a part of the earth where neither pillows of clouds, nor grey threads of trailed vapor, nor grotesque smears of carcinogenic fingerprints obstructed, for several seconds running.

 Bloom’s sisters surrounded her, throwing themselves theatrically against her petals as the sun’s leering eye admired her. 

She was so indescribably lovely that even the jaded universe that was Clarion Blue Sky seethed with jealousy over how pretty she was.

Fan dancers her nigh-as-divine siblings were

 

Voyeur Sun knows naught but that it wants.

Sunset Vaporizes the Antiseptic Asphalt, to which I say Right On!

Nearing Dusk.

Sheets of asphalt obstruct the sun, or vainly try to; but they fail because it’s that lush dusk orange all over–that orange that makes the oldest, most jaded soul feel like an open-mouthed and wide-eyed kid rolling down a grassy hill and watching the earth and blue sky spin head over toes.

Bellevue (God in Sky)