On gloomy overcast , Driving down the Texas road.. Destination airstrip, to fly above the gray sad day, And see the sun from my Cessna that I pilot today..  No matter what I can always see the sun when I fly above the gray..  

No matter how the day looks.. I can always see the sun in my Cessna..

I have found my soul,
and it resides in a tiny Cessna.
Some people live dream to dream,
Me, I live flight to flight.
Just me, the sky, and my Cessna.
In that seat I feel whole.
Thank you for the journey today dear friend,
I long for you once again.

The young woman, plain, was unsmiling behind the control panel,
a ribald passion filled his veins, her mien has to do something,
the airfield was deluged by waves of grief, among them
was those robust women, he tried to forget but couldn't
who may defeat the purpose, if he takes a second look.

She gave her word to fly the single engine airplane
"Don't fear darling, i am an aerobatics specialist
if need arises i wouldn't hesitate to crash land,
take care of your hurt, bleeding lonely heart".
How reassuring! never would he turn back,
after this difficult take off awaited life long.
No more entries in this log book.

Her dark make up, was feline an added attraction
that gave him a libidinous surge, an ******* with ample promises,
to last till he reaches his destination final, from where
the return flight, is even unthinkable the lady pilot winks.

This Cessna to the unknown, has the aphrodisiacal scent of
wild orchid flowers he once discovered in the far stretches
of the Western Ghat mountain ranges
and ******* secretions of one particular lover
a reminder perhaps death wants to carry as it happens

You leave the apostrophes to someone else, I can't even make it in to 'im', instead I'm writing papers about the Oneida and Jonestown murders.
The television is on, the air purifier
is dying. I can hear the ***** fan belt of my laptop on the fritz or the fizzy bubbles of
The Cranberry Redbull that I'm trying.
I could be a great sport. Ya know, anything you want.

Jump to.

Make the Miso soup, clear off the kitchen table, buy brand new markers with no recent pictures drawn into their nibs.
Throw in comfy pants. I don't know what else I have to offer, a clean bath? Some books? A magazine?

The weather is exciting, we could call get Pneumonia or at least share a drink and catch Hep-C,
Put our children together to catch the gift of Shingles. A motorcycle toy for my Uritis it is better. The roses from the sweater paired with leather, leggings, and a kick *** song. Inside we can talk about his hair cut and going to California. I'm intimidated by you moreover when you tell me you can eat airplanes with only your bare hands. And even if I'm a bore, I still have Streptococcus. So seal and deliver. My cerulean goddess, with the best, thank  thank you for the nightmare fever you stole from the words I wrote.  And at the end of your book you don't have to cop out and fall along a crippled sky. With crippled words, verbs, and losers. Score cards of different colors. Tunics proud as the walk to the river we voted from Baptism to demon-voter. Stand and deliver, flora and fauna that threatens to eat our home.

The ancient banyan tree is huge, its parallel trunks,
Go across , spiral out, spread  branches,
Sheltering birds; doves or eagles, it doesn't bother.
Above that a kite lost  mid way on  its pleasure flight aimlessly circles.
A grey half moon tries to remain inconspicuous in the day light.
A single engine Cessna sky hawk from Bangalore flying club,
Laboriously crawl across the sky like an overeaten caterpillar.

He remains,
Oblivious of the world around, and its many preoccupations.
Within a craggy nook created by the irregular stem of the banyan,
The old man sits like an idol, totally alien to the world, that is in its Nataraja's dance*
A long, grey, shaggy beard; serene radiant face,
Stunning  any one, looking at him with the contentment blooms there, a radiant flower.
His rags for long time has not seen water, its obvious,
A soiled turban around his head is tightly tied, yet  he looks regal.
He is silence personified, has no needs, it seems.
He breathes freedom day and night, no dependency on others,
Sounds, discordant and confusing, from the nearby road, fails even to touch him,
The dust wind that circles around, only creates a halo for him.
A plastic bag full of stuff, his worthless belongings, lie by his side, like a severed head.
An old news paper he holds, to shield him from the setting sun's attention.

On the third day I found out, he has friends.
Though there seems no need to speak, words are too precious to waste, isn't it what he implies?
A dark, frail woman driving back her buffalo and its calf after grazing in the fields,
Stops in front of him smiling, he smiles back; for the first time I saw a smile speaking to another.
A silent exchange of feelings, I could experience, even  in nature, since then. An awakening he brought.
Every time I watch him, with an open mind, the contentment I see, recites wordless poems

Years later
muffled like new snowfall
this ash
permeating teeth and skin.

Back then, I was still naive enough to trust
Old Jimmy when he offered to fly me
over the blast zone in his beat-up Cessna
the words Scenic Tours peeling off its purple tail.

His latent appetite would later manifest  
on the ride home in his musty Cadillac
the passenger door dented shut
preventing an easy exit.

That day
gray extended
as far as eyes could see
denuded trunks laid to rest
in perfect unison

we flew
for miles and miles
over nothing living

just ash
permeating teeth and skin
fallen matchsticks
and men.

fifteen minutes or so
the pilot lumbers out from the ladies room
she weighs as much as our cessna.
perhaps now she's lighter.

she grunts into the cockpit
and ensures her girth has not switched on or off
any vital instruments.
safety is our number one concern.

i've been more confident in lawnmower engines.
this rumbled like rapture.
i shook, but so did everything else.
we flew like a mallard

over lakes and forest.
we saw a shipwreck that now hosts
families for lunch.
as well as a few baseball fields.

the air was a force.
it asserted it self, to be certain.
i sensed its angst.
it translated thoroughly.

she rambled on
it was her tenth flight today.
i looked behind,
my love was green.

my bed became a sanctuary of nothingness.   But I fear emptiness.  Its close.  A paralysis of indecision permeates like frigid winter through drafty walls.  I decide to sleep in.  

Occasionally turning to see the clock- minutes, hours pile up like ***** dishes.

During broad daylight, the distant noise of a cessna impedes into my room, defining a vast separation.  One, maybe two people up there have an interesting life, an important destination.  Listening to their flight gives me something to do.  When they are gone, I have nothing left but a fingerprint stained glass of water.

By late afternoon, the lost day vaguely disturbs like seeing one shoe on a highway.  
Either painful or a waste, nothing good about it.  

Finally light dims.  A broken clock is right twice in a day, but since I'm the one who stopped, the clock catches up with my uselessness in bed.
The period on the sentence that I have, truly, accomplished nothing.  

Darkness justifies my nap.  A relief as I can finally end the day with some sleep.

I dream of being infinite, traversing the universe a narrow beam of light.  You pass me by a little faster, but turn around so we can create time together, to become here.

I dream of when we camped by a river's waterfall.  Half awake my eyes can see the tent filled with soft green light.  No light source but bright enough to see by, everything in the tent and you sleeping peacefully. Logic corrects me, says it a New Moon and I shouldn't be able to see anything.  My eyes agree and slowly darken, blind to the color of love's aura that I can still feel.

I wake.  Pour one bowl of cereal instead of two, remembering when you looked up from breakfast and said, "let’s ride our bikes across the country," just like that.  And just like that we did, halfway anyway.  1500 miles was just the beginning.  I love the places you take me.

I call you up.  "Let's not call them dealbreakers, ok?"

It was summer, late 80's,  Lubbock, Texas, age prevents me from recallng the exact date and time. It was my father on the phone, asking if me and my wife, Karen, would like to go with him out to the airport to visit with my Uncle Jack(Major, USAF ret.). Jack called him and said that he and a 'friend' were flying in private plane to Houston, and would be stopping in Lubock and would be in around noon. Jack was the youngest of three brothers, and my favorite. Shortly before eleven, dad picked us up and off we went. I asked dad if he knew who was coming with him, and he said "no, have no idea."
Sitting in the coffee shop, looking out the windows, we saw this Cessna land, and taxi over to the gate. "There they are", dad said, with some anticipation. In a few minutes Jack and his 'friend' emerged. The 'friend" was tall, slender, grayish hair, crew cut. He looked familiar, that 'friend' as they entered the room, and then came the introductions.
His name was "Deke" Slayton. One of the original seven astronauts chosen by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) to participate in the original Mercury program in 1959,and was later the pilot of the docking module when they docked with the Soviet Soyuz capsule in 1975. He was a bomber pilot during WWII, and later became a test pilot. Jack was a glider pilot during the war, and upon retiring from the air force went to work for the FAA(Federal Aeronautics Administration) as Supv. Flight Control Operations, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They had known each other for a long time.
Needless to say, Karen and I nearly "slid out if our chairs", for it's not everyday when you find yourself having a casual cup of coffee and conversation with someone who considered such feats as, "just doing his job."
"You never know, who you're going to meet..... on any given day..... at any given time."
r.riddle: 10-16-2016

Laurel Street. the beginning of a magic chant. Letter B, for best, great for the pride. Home of the native Chicago lions. Two years of secrets and we moved in just underneath the last sigh of worry. Surrounded by banks. Red-lettered banks, banks with trapezoidal vaults, banks with free drip coffee and lollies, banks with no lines but everybody's money; bank at the corner with the chimney from the world war, the one mom's dad came back and went to the basement to put his money in a copper box in the trapezoidal vault, a bank of the copper boxes. Freed from all the unions of our caretakers this was our first chance for flight- or free fall. One trip to the stone streets of the far East, and one weekend to see the vineyards during the off season in Napa. Then we lived in a stilted house on a steep hill surrounded by bare fruited palms; the deck we agreed that you wanted. The home that I needed you to have. Above my chair I wrapped black electric-tape to all the windows; no stray Cessna banner would lay an unwanted word on my eyes. We slapped ourselves to the California King and tuned out for a day and a half to The Smiths. In your walk-in you stripped off the robin's egg wallpaper and hung up your Dior, your cold feet trying on every **** pair you had while I sipped guava nectar in my other room chrysalis- eventually I bribed you away with my sticky bun. Two nights passed before you let me sit you in the Jaguar, I wanted to go to the landing at Half Moon Bay. We danced and waded in the high tide. Then you collected smoothed sea glass while I buried myself in Hughes trying to find the meaning of striding at the beach. You were in such a paralysis of anxious dizziness I barely understood. I wrapped you up with great giant arms, the arms that let us win the war, that brought me to you, the arms I found you with, and mixed me with you. And your lips lept at mine, you clang to me for life, for my life inside you, and enveloped my face in your hands, nursing you back to life with my breaths. For heaps of existence- anything to feel that awesome aliveness between us. Your heavy black heart turning hot white coal inside my arms. I made myself the popular Boeing engines, throttled my legs upwards, though slightly unbalanced, I shot us up, towards the nimbus in the sky. Then I watched you reassemble your loose parts, your parents, the nut-house, high school weighed your legs down. You were twenty one hands of horse, working so hard, shaking your new foal feet sturdy. When krrrbaang, our albumineous hare was swallowed up by dark and bursting storm thunder. It startled you, but also me. I saw how your swirls and your sea glass, your heavy gasping lever for pulling in love was struck out of you in one bang of thunderous sound. What clanging hell was this!

We escaped to our tiny two door, but once inside it was our fearsome lair, that place of us safe from thunder or lightning, hephalumps and woozels. The sky melted its tepid Summer day beneath, through all of its pillars of thunder and fistfuls of electricity. It lasted from Bay to Belmont, up the steps and until we were safe in our king bed. Each of us wrestled our wet clothes off our cooled hides, and fought for our share of the pull cover. Impaling each other, we collided until we found the perfect place of entwinement; quietly affirming with each other that we would never leave the mattress again. Dream maimed and anxious you only lasted so long supine.

The laundry. The kitchen dishes, our wet sheets, they all haunted you. A crisp agony befell you half of every day, daily afresh. Every morning a new trail of broken glass to carry you over, fear hung to your ears, dripped from your eyes and the limped down your nose. Weeks and weeks of you trying to convince us that you were always the poison. Like a ranting katydid sipping dark matter through a scotch glass you tried at every thing to quell your ticking nerves. But you continued to spin, like a mad sparrow always falling on itself in the sky. I tried every day to gather you up, but eventually you tore off your wings. And what good was I, I only made good of our arms, climbing up and down, bringing flesh flowers to nourish the nest, through the branches. What a waste I was! What did our rain dancing tide-bearing sea searches leave us with? Happiness for me, always. It sat staring at you through your window like a vagrant black dove, a crow, a penguin.---- I laid down beside you. I trembled over in my head, why you eventually sealed your veins. It puzzled me to my core. I wandered through many cities and sat through many lectures with my head bowed. Once I was two blocks from peeling back your mahogany box and screaming at you; but too close the tears obscured my sight from finding my way. If I had had to face our scenario again, to sit in that vanishing supernatural faded light that emanated from us, what I could come up with, all that I could make out, was you, there was and will always be you.

Don’t know where should I go
And I don’t think I cared anymore
Wide opened sectional
With a standby plotter
A flight computer
And a pencil

But no line was drawn
My plotter became useless
I let my Cessna flew by his own
And he followed where the wind blew

I noticed
The wind pushed me to that same airport
The same runway I tried to avoid
It's like faith
The further I go
The stronger the wind blows
Or it's just my crazy theory
Or maybe my mind plays tricks on me

I’m lost in the nowhere’s skies
And I still found her
No matter how far I fly
The wind leads me to her

Laurel Street. the beginning of a magic chant. Letter B, for best, great for the pride. Home of the native Chicago lions. Two years of secrets and we moved in just underneath the last sigh of worry. Surrounded by banks. Red-lettered banks, banks with trapezoidal vaults, banks with free drip coffee and lollies, banks with no lines but everybody's money; bank at the corner with the chimney from the world war, the one mom's dad came back and went to the basement to put his money in a copper box in the trapezoidal vault, a bank of the copper boxes. Freed from all the unions of our caretakers this was our first chance for flight- or free fall. One trip to the stone streets of the far East, and one weekend to see the vineyards during the off season in Napa. Then we lived in a stilted house on a steep hill surrounded by bare fruited palms; the deck we agreed that you wanted. The home that I needed you to have. Above my chair I wrapped black electric-tape to all the windows; no stray Cessna banner would lay an unwanted word on my eyes. We slapped ourselves to the California King and tuned out for a day and a half to The Smiths. In your walk-in you stripped off the robin's egg wallpaper and hung up your Dior, your cold feet trying on every **** pair you had while I sipped guava nectar in my other room chrysalis- eventually I bribed you away with my sticky bun. Two nights passed before you let me sit you in the Jaguar, I wanted to go to the landing at Half Moon Bay. We danced and waded in the high tide. Then you collected smoothed sea glass while I buried myself in Hughes trying to find the meaning of striding at the beach. You were in such a paralysis of anxious dizziness I barely understood. I wrapped you up with great giant arms, the arms that let us win the war, that brought me to you, the arms I found you with, and mixed me with you. And your lips lept at mine, you clang to me for life, for my life inside you, and enveloped my face in your hands, nursing you back to life with my breaths. For heaps of existence- anything to feel that awesome aliveness between us. Your heavy black heart turning hot white coal inside my arms. I made myself the popular Boeing engines, throttled my legs upwards, though slightly unbalanced, I shot us up, towards the nimbus in the sky. Then I watched you reassemble your loose parts, your parents, the nut-house, high school weighed your legs down. You were twenty one hands of horse, working so hard, shaking your new foal feet sturdy. When krrrbaang, our albumineous hare was swallowed up by dark and bursting storm thunder. It startled you, but also me. I saw how your swirls and your sea glass, your heavy gasping lever for pulling in love was struck out of you in one bang of thunderous sound. What clanging hell was this!

We escaped to our tiny two door, but once inside it was our fearsome lair, that place of us safe from thunder or lightning, hephalumps and woozels. The sky melted its tepid Summer day beneath, through all of its pillars of thunder and fistfuls of electricity. It lasted from Bay to Belmont, up the steps and until we were safe in our king bed. Each of us wrestled our wet clothes off our cooled hides, and fought for our share of the pull cover. Impaling each other, we collided until we found the perfect place of entwinement; quietly affirming with each other that we would never leave the mattress again. Dream maimed and anxious you only lasted so long supine.

The laundry. The kitchen dishes, our wet sheets, they all haunted you. A crisp agony befell you half of every day, daily afresh. Every morning a new trail of broken glass to carry you over, fear hung to your ears, dripped from your eyes and the limped down your nose. Weeks and weeks of you trying to convince us that you were always the poison. Like a ranting katydid sipping dark matter through a scotch glass you tried at every thing to quell your ticking nerves. But you continued to spin, like a mad sparrow always falling on itself in the sky. I tried every day to gather you up, but eventually you tore off your wings. And what good was I, I only made good of our arms, climbing up and down, bringing flesh flowers to nourish the nest, through the branches. What a waste I was! What did our rain dancing tide-bearing sea searches leave us with? Happiness for me, always. It sat staring at you through your window like a vagrant black dove, a crow, a penguin.---- I laid down beside you. I trembled over in my head, why you eventually sealed your veins. It puzzled me to my core. I wandered through many cities and sat through many lectures with my head bowed. Once I was two blocks from peeling back your mahogany box and screaming at you; but too close the tears obscured my sight from finding my way. If I had had to face our scenario again, to sit in that vanishing supernatural faded light that emanated from us, what I could come up with, all that I could make out, was you, there was and will always be you.