Lovely Penguin

by marie gordon
The plan is this:
Tomorrow morning I will board a plane. I don’t know where I will go yet. I will go somewhere safe, where my money will last me for a while. Perhaps I will go back to Prague. Prague was beautiful, inexpensive. It is so easy to say I am leaving. I am leaving. Really, I am. No matter how I look at it, though, I know my mind will stay here, in this place where I am now, maybe only for a while. Maybe for the rest of my life.
How badly I want to pickup and go. How desperate the need to escape, but I cannot take down my web so quickly. I have flies to demolish, knots to fix, maybe baby spiders one day. What good is it to leave? I will spin a web somewhere new. Somewhere new and wonder what the point was. What was the point in leaving in the first place? Do the flies taste better in Prague?
Why stay? Why go? Why bother believe if there is nothing left to believe in? Maybe it makes me feel better. Maybe it is easier to go. Maybe it is easier to stay. Divine intervention will not intervene on my behalf. No one will make this decision for me. That’s the trick. No one makes me, but I am here. I stay here for someone. For myself, my family, who?
This is me, concentrating on finding the reins, when I already have them in my hand. I have everything I need to go. Nothing I want. Maybe a hope for a better life. Maybe a belief that somewhere else is better than here. I can buy the ticket, pack my bag. It won’t take long to do all that. It won’t.
Somehow I just know. Even if I do all that tonight, chances are I will still be here in the morning, with an unused plane ticket, and a packed bag waiting for me to put its clothes back in the dresser.

Technorati Tags: Short Story

by marie gordon

It’s a sauna here
On this muddy floor
Grasping this boiling vent
Craving an ice cold beer

Inside the clean spring
Deep secrets I keep
Locked tight in my white shell
If only clams could sing…

The otters swim round
Scuba divers peer
Into my murky hole
Hovering my ground

Thirst insatiable
By boiling coffee
In darkness I’ve no rest
My angst ignitable

Oh to be a clam
Contented at peace
Living in a clambake
A rock is what I am

It’s trifling indeed
A petty cooked clam
To cover murky myths
And placate fowl greed

Boiled, I am crisp
My shell lost its grip
Whitewash murky waters
Floating on surface bliss

Oh to be a clam
Contented at last
A boiled cork afloat
A broken seal I am