Mango Oracles

I methodically cut into my mango slice by slice, balanced on a wad of napkins, licking sticky fingers and making sure all the orange peach colored meat is taken from the mysteriously tough fiberious pit. i consume it quickly. enjoying the sound of the knife cutting the fruit and scraping the pit. a contradiction: i find myself dispassionate lately about a lot of things. A friend not speaking to me is a buzzing gnat that i can't even muster outrage over. Just a sigh. Well if that's how it is then... well... (the tail goes swish, swat, swat) maybe i'm depressed over the job ending. am i? i don't seem thrilled over the freetime either... As i eat and enjoy slice after slice, contemplating the taste and texture of each bite, juice down my chin, sucking on each piece and gripping them with my teeth and running them clean. and yet, I feel mangoless, though lately i've been enjoying all the wonderful deliciousness they possess. I've bit by bit begun to paint again and write and reawaken whatever creative impulses have been wasted in time taking activities. and yet still it's like i slumber. rolling my neck side to side. de ja vu in french class jolting me to other realities but just barely a beat rising. what was that, what was breaking thru like a pulse and gone. dreams of myself, my mother- dying quietly, sleepily in the garden, peacefully passing while sitting in a pose of sitting on haunches, hands in lap, eyes closed and straight forward- shocked awake, sad and heartache, vowed to remember but fighting thru thick webs of hour after hour of nothing. pondering the uncut mango. smooth. is it ripe. too ripe? unripe. cut into it. i talk to jesus in sighs and murmurs, snatches of conversation distracted and lifted up in tired gazes. i do not ponder what he may be teaching me but am waiting for resuscitation of color to breathe new life into the canvas. have i fallen asleep? am i waiting to be wakened. bring it to me. i ache. the music says it better than i do. the still air. the cat across my path. and everyone else speaking from a far off place. i am left with the pit and dirty hands. but do not remember.