Expatriot
Camille breezes through security,
unpacks her laptop, checks email,
Facebook, from an
airport café.
The trim waiter brings hot chowder,
an icy mimosa, offers tempting desserts.
In an hour, she’ll lift off from San Francisco,
wave goodbye to parched California:
crowded cookie cutter houses,
empty reservoirs,
snowless Sierras.
At the boarding gate,
she unclenches,
imagines a clean slate,
reinvented reality,
herself starting over.
Departure from Been There And
Done It To Death.
Destination: Adventure. Possibility.
Barcelona. Madrid.
Carne
While in Spain, Camille renounces
her vegetarian past, craves meat
in every form, morning and night.
Salivates over salami, thin prosciutto slices,
grows wet at the sight of foil-wrapped ham.
Crisp bacon seduces,
weans her from breakfast yogurt.
Siren song of steak and sangria for lunch.
By dinner, her appetite is reduced
to bruschetta sprinkled with chorizo,
a bit of green salad, shards of hard cheese.
All night she fantasizes flesh in many forms:
succulent pork, mouth-watering beef.
Sleeps soundly, lost in carnal dreams.
Mimo
Camille has known her share of chameleons.
This silver Spaniard with metallic stage props
simply one more performance artist
camouflaged by imaginative makeup.
He postures, plays to the crowd,
donation can before his podium,
aggressively shilling for money.
The man has neither humility nor shame.
Stares and smirks, intuits exactly
what Camille is thinking
as she flings a small coin,
pauses to appraise
his trim, muscular body.
An alive experience shared....well conveyed. Ray Foreman
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