musings of a llama

                alpacas by john farnan

I want to live where the police officers ride on four-legged mounts and carry neon colored foam batons as their only weapons. When they come down the road with their clickety-clack the children run out to take candy from strangers and the colors of skin, and foam, and candy wrappers fill the air with no room for anything less than tenderness. 

I want to comb beaches, setting up huts and forts and gathering collections of very specific things to lay out on the deck at night by the light of the fire, and go to sleep counting waves and stars. On waking there is fog and damp and we whisper to each other all day, counting the quiet within ourselves as beings, and according them their respect. 

I want to wear the earth in my hair and on my body and let my own strength radiate out as though my skin were underlayed with diamonds and crushed gems. With gold on my nose, feathers given to me one by one from a thousand birds, with the brown eyes I carry blazing with wet dripping stars, I turn to you and reach out my hand. 

I want to ride on two wheels through the windiest canyon roads and across the great flat sandy plains and over the hills of the mountain pass where the air smells of wet pine and eagle feathers and mycelia and the exhaust of the engine and I warm my hands under the leather on your back. 

I want to talk story with my elders forever and let their guileless wisdom come at me sometimes too late and sometimes right on time and remind them that their place is still with me, always with me, still brimming with the usefulness so necessary to the culture we are building in plain sight of the culture we have left behind. 

I want to turn the hose on in the yard and make a puddle of mud and get way way down and revel in the slimey warmth, making all the animal sounds that we can conjure while painting our faces and breathing and saying no honey, you never need a mirror, I'll show you how beautiful you are. 

I want to grasp within my own hands the very stuff of this life, these things that I can both hold and that slip right through, invisible but tangible, and never treat time and effort as enemies of another camp but instead dance out my restlessness, calling on my own drum, training my eyes to see in slow motion the dust that kicks up as each footfall lands home. I dance because I know magic, and this creation has revealed itself to me, and I must move. 

I want to walk through you undetected, you never knowing that under my petticoats my spine is made of snake, my breasts of earth, my thighs of chocolate, my belly of gold, and that I carry rainbows and the seeds and fruits of labors in my pockets and have entire worlds of mystical creatures taking sweet refuge in all the corners of my being. 

I want you to know I may never notice you or look at you or land in the exact spot you are wanting. I may never compliment you or share with you or choose to create with you what you want to create. I may not agree with your imagination or the very essence of your being and I may always do the exact opposite of what you wish I would do. I want you to know I don't love you any less for that.