Dog And Cat Days

Oh the sea foam green dreams of young kitten girls with soft clouds of hair and stooped shoulders. They break on the rocks and spray the faces of bull dog boys waiting on the beach with their guitars and bon fires and all hearts have wings that beat against the cages of rib bone that house them. So often we feel them trying to fly up out of our throats and they get stuck there as a lump, or sometimes they flutter around in our stomachs especially when our eyes meet or some bit of flesh brushes up against another. We’ll be drug or gun runners and we’ll sit by turquoise pools in forgotten desert motels and sip drinks garnished with hot pink paper umbrellas until we get our stomachs shot out and we bleed out red blood into some old avocado green shag and hold hands and feel shocked watching the light go out of our eyes.
We’ll be rock stars with coke habits and old mink coats and big sunglasses and then we’ll look more than ever like the kitten girls and bull dog boys we are. We carve our initials into the sandy cliffs that overlook the surf and kitten girls know that the wind will blow the names away and there will be no more KG “heart” BDB some day, but still her eyes are full of stars and Harley Davidsons rumble through her cranium. They could just live in an apartment that smells like antiques and old ladies down by the sea, soaking the asbestos up while being nobodies together. She can write a novel that no one will publish and he can work in construction and play in a band that sounds like animals fighting in the guts of land mowers and each can maintain with pride their respective My Space profiles.
It was meant to be glorious and shining, our youth unending, the mysteries of the universe always sparkling over us, hearts always trying to escape these excited bodies, these chemical factories for building space ships for the Gods. We would die young and live in the kingdom of heaven forever. Maybe recklessly manufacture smurf speed in a bathtub in a sagging house off of Machado St. and wait for the fantastic explosion that would set our hearts free. Kitten girl would do anything, anything at all to feel alive, break her hymen over Tom Waits songs, bite and scratch, forget the condoms, take a greyhound bus to another state, watch strangers play video games and drink wine coolers in living rooms that smell like nothingness. She’d even shave away the soft clouds of hair and invoke demons in circles and stars made of masking tape and spend the night in cars parked at run down drive ins.
Somewhere along the way the dreams were trapped in black bottles and distilled into nightmares brewed in basements.
What happened to recording our newest song in the bathroom on an old cassette player and ditching school to play it on the old boss stereo for grandma? What happened to dancing half naked in the surf and bulldog boys in pink dresses and kitten girls singing songs on the fences of hot alleys?
In some tear drop of time we are there, like insects trapped in amber, our spirits were left behind in the golden sun filled afternoons of our dog and cat days. Now we march, life less old wrinkled things with guts too heavy to swing to the music and hearts too swollen with betrayals of self to flutter or even flop. Poor hearts, the wings have so hopelessly atrophied. This slow death is not the glory we imagined, is not the song to the immortal that we dreamed we’d learn to sing. When did we become tame old pets with small dreams? Little petty fantasies so devoid of life they can no longer crash onto shores but only slosh about like old beer in plastic cups?
Oh the sea foam green dreams of young kitten girls with soft clouds of hair and stooped shoulders. They used to break on the rocks and spray the faces of bull dog boys waiting on the beach with their guitars and bon fires and everyone’s hearts had wings that beat against the cages of rib bone that housed them.
We can live again in the bright and shinning moment, dancing and singing the sparkle of the stars. The night sky will once again drip with mystery, our hearts might again shudder with ecstasy and its promise. Anything is yet possible while we still breathe, even if there is a tear drop in which we are sour little pusses and sleeping old dogs, there is always another moment waiting to be born. A sea foam green bead of liquid life in which we rise from our ashes and live, live, live, live, wild and magick things from other times and other places, from fantasy books and independent films, soft kitten girls and brave hearted bull dog boys, the stewards of live hearts.
And now that innocence has become experience we’ll know how to let them fly. We’ll let them soar like birds of prey, graceful and far seeing carrying us to all new vistas of sound and color, to worlds knit of avocado green shag and soft pale clouds of hair and guitars and bonfires and pink flesh stitched together with boom boxes and reels of old film. Oh the sea foam green dreams with their Harley Davidson rumble and the red blood that sloshes like beer in old cups shuddering with ecstasy distilled into nightmares. The glory we imagined is the song to the immortal that we dreamed we’d sing with our tear drops of time wrapped in stooped shoulders. We break on the rocks and the wind blows the names away along with the cages of rib bone that housed them.