(Excerpt from an epic poem)

Polishing Gems On The Surface Of The Sea

1. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a book or movie but then I realize I’m in a dream.

2. Across our time, I’m a wave rolling forward, the undertow pulling back, and you, you are my rip current, my last gasp of breath before going under.

3. The day I met Jack O’Malley a single yellow balloon floated into the yard. I tied it to my VW’s antennae and drove to the beach. I can still imagine it twirling in an invisible twister just beyond my view.

4. Jack is now my Jack, and he loves Jack Kerouac, but I love my Jack more than Jack loves Jack.

5. There is momentum in the moments we share as we read On The Road to one another.

6. At times, I feel guilty for lusting after Jack Kerouac but one cannot have too much Jack.

7. Before my eyes close I say, “Magical thinking is even more fun than the regular kind.”

8. I often taste the future before it arrives, hear it, see it, sense it.
When I turn on the TV, Judy Garland is singing, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

9. I’ve only been awake for a minute, but Jack has been on my mind for hours.
I stop on the freeway in awe of the light fingers reaching through the clouds.

10. On our first date, Jack got down on one knee and asked me to visualize a diamond ring.

11. I consider a career in advertising after watching Mad Men, but this estuary thought opens a passage that floods the sanctity of the poems in my mind.

12. Jack is driving, and I’m watching it all go by.

13. At a poetry reading in Mendocino, we meet a girl named Dorothy from Kansas.

14. Mmm, Pavarotti with a latte.

15. Jack and I find a collector’s box of butterflies in a second-hand store with “Jack” written on the back; we talk of destiny.

16. Kismet and irony are what Jack and I eat for breakfast.

17. Look! The clouds are like goose down at a distance, blurred and gray, soft and unreal in the fading light.

18. I wonder who drove the pins through the hearts of the butterflies in the box.

19. I lie on my surfboard waiting for a wave; my outstretched arms become the wings of a giant blue Morpho butterfly.

20. Jack says the Blue Morpho is the most beautiful creature he’s ever seen.
Ripples of heat rise off the road, and we are enveloped in sage and silence as we drive in a waterless world across the Mojave.

21. Jack and I like to play Breakfast at Tiffany’s every chance we get.

22. Today we are on our fourth cocktail before noon.

23. I usually write when Jack is asleep but sometimes we write together on cocktail napkins.

24. There is so much beauty in the world, nothing else matters.

25. Two hawks fly over our house.

26. Jack says that we have the same spirit animal.

27. It is wine with La Wally, and all is well.

To read the rest “Polishing A Gem On The Surface Of The Sea” please contact the author via Facebook and request a copy of My Myths. Her page is “Kelle Grace Gaddis” To date, My Myths has sold 553 copies of it’s 555 book run. Yellow Chair Press might have a couple of copies left too. It is $15 + shipping. Thank you!