Poem #82 of 365

Curtis leaned out the window
with a whiskered grin
thrusting an enveloped card
into my palm

a card from a shaman
in Austin, a poet with
diabetes named Ariel.

She is an initiated daykeeper
in the Mayan tradition and
pounds on the house
when the chimes are too loud.

I know the strangest people
with the most delicate
of temperaments, the quirks
and the quips of yearning,
learning destitute times.

Ariel read my back in a
night on the floor, measuring
my muscles with precise
pressure and surmising
that I carry my mother's
conscience in my hump
my hump my hump.

She, as housemate, cooked
one egg and set it on the
smallest plate, and she
wore her safari hat
to Chicago House on
dark nights with no a/c.

Someday I'll be that strange
and beloved, with many more
pals and admirers jesting my ways,
and it will come
again to mind that GM's
theory will possibly be true:

we love people and make them
our friends, despite their neuroses,
precisely because it is those neuroses
that endear them, dearly, to us.

copyright 2007 tammy melody gomez