Pointed Toe Long Heeled Red Stiletto Under An Orange Desert Sky
There’s something about a pointed toe, long heeled red stiletto rising out of the sand under an Orange Desert Sky guided every slowly by a stranger’s long, suntanned leg that leaves broken memories lying fallow, memories slowly covered over with wind-blown sand, and pushes the fresh shoot of a yearning desert flower toward the sun’s orange glow.
There’s something about a pointed toe, long heeled red stiletto that must be as uncomfortable to wear as thoughts hiding in the darker corners of its beholder’s mind. Thoughts that pull you like a moth to a flame. The kind of thoughts that the nuns told you would send you to the eternal fires of hell. Thoughts that you try to make last, like something in a partially torn, color-faded polaroid photo of something that you never let your parents see, taken on a family vacation when you were just beyond being a kid.
There’s something about a pointed toe, long heeled red stiletto that almost makes you welcome the pain it just might bring, far more pleasured than endured. Yeah, that “dirty” little pleasure that pushes not so delicately, and ever so devilishly, into your chest, or wherever else it chooses to make contact, like the feeling you get when you bite into a slightly hard section of an unripened orange, before the juices flow. Yeah, all under an Orange Desert Sky, in an unanticipated, but welcomed, Orange Desert High.
There’s something about a pointed toe, long heeled red stiletto. Yeah, I don’t mean those fuck-me pumps with their stacked, under-toe two-inch platforms and some sort of fake reptilian-like pattern or glitter-shit glued to the toe, the kind Amy Winehouse sang about. I’m talking about the classy ones…slim and trim with a spiked high heal and a pointed toe, in scarlet red, that could kick a .45 caliber sized gaping hole into the gonads of anyone who took them as an unintended personal invitation and didn’t take no for an answer. I’m talking about the kind that Bacall used to lure Bogart to her luscious red lips in a smokey barroom bistro near the Champs-Elysees, when black and white ruled the day. Yeah, those…
There’s something about a pointed toe, long heeled red stiletto. Hot sweat on a bare white thigh. Flashes of passion-colors racing across an Orange Desert Sky. And truth becomes a lie.
Yeah, there’s something about a pointed toe, long heeled red stiletto. But it’s not really about the shoe at all, it’s about how fucked up you must be to get excited about a damned shoe…A shoe, a goddamned shoe… No, no. It’s way more than the shoe. Just like it’s not about the paint that has you standing in front of a Jackson Pollack painting captured by its textures, it’s twists and turns, it’s colors and shapes, its layers, its embedded embellishments. It’s about what you think it’s about. It’s all about the imagination running wild. That’s what it’s all about. Pointed toe, long heeled red stilettos…And abstract art. They’re all about what you think they’re about.
Yeah, there’s something about a pointed toe, long heeled red stiletto…
c. 2024 Carl Rubino
Did You Eat The Tomato, And Other Questusations?
“Did you eat the tomato?”
That’s sort of the way it always starts
It wasn’t what she says that makes it end the way it usually does
It’s how she fuckin’ says it
I kind of think of it as a questusation…
A seemingly innocent question that has evolved from a history of benign accusations
It comes tumbling out of nowhere, at unpredictable times of day
Like a tsunami that evades the early warning system
Once it rolls out, it seems to take on a life of its own
Kind of like an improv scene from a prompt
I’m not sure what it is I do to deserve, or should I perhaps say “trigger”, the irregularly occuring questusations
I think that perhaps they somehow have an imperceptible, at least to me, genesis
But I seem to be caught in their little riptides’ multiple times per day
And it’s kind of like a trap
‘Cause I respond defensively, I mean, who the fuck wouldn’t?
Like, “It’s not your own personal tomato.
It’s just a fucking tomato, in the refrigerator, for anyone who lives here to eat.”
So if it’s not there, someone obviously ate it or maybe it was used to cook something
“Yeah.” “Guess what? I used it to cook the fucking baked fish with onion and tomato in butter and white wine sauce that you had last night.”
“Did you eat the tomato?”
Jesus Fuckin’ Christ…
c. 2022 Carl Rubino
Resistance
They really are, more or less, very similar at their core
With a common raison d’etre, despite disparate appearances
At rest one might perceive them as immobile, fixed in their state, unyielding
Seemingly resistant to change, or at the very least, indifferent to transformation
Yet once sufficiently provoked, prodded or primed
Layers peel back, perhaps tentatively or unsure at first
Until all begins to glide, now and then in perfect unison
And now and then as if to a different beat
Until, in a slippery yet seemingly choreographed sort of flow
They pair with each other
In a timeless dance both selfish and selfless
A seeming contradiction that has partnered since the beginning of time
And, in time, as suddenly as the they began,
Tired, spent, consumed, each retreats to its primal state
Resistant once again – at least for now
Published: Boreal Zine, Issue 5, Winter 2019. instagram.com/borealzine
c. Carl Rubino
On The Bus
siting at a window seat on the bus
as i am every working day
heading for a pointless, going nowhere,
dead end, mindless job
gazing absently at the patterns left on the aisle floor by snow encrusted dirty feet
i saw your high heels reach the top step
and though not even a single glance
let alone a word or phrase had yet exchanged
i got the strangest feeling
just as you reached that top step
that perhaps as fate would have it
you might come to fill the void left in space by the empty seat beside me
and that soon we’d come to know and appreciate each other
in the deepest and most personal and intimate sort of way that anyone could imagine…
as the door closed just behind you
the bus let out a deep breath
and unless i was mistaken
as you contemplated your seat our eyes met
with a veiled anticipation,
or was that too much to expect,
and when you sat right down beside me
i noticed your hair was still wet
like you’d just come from the shower
at least that was my best guess
i know i digress some at this point
but i sure do love the sight and the smell of a woman just come from the bath
with her hair all wet and stuck to her shoulders
and the little beads of water still gathered and glistening on her skin in the early morning sunlight
or perhaps in the glare of a bare hundred watt light bulb in a cheap motel room
somewhere in the seedier section of a town that i’ve never been to before
but maybe just imagined once or twice, a little bit, on an odd occasion or two
late at night when I’m all alone
but there’s no need to dwell on that…
as i closed my eyes to savor
the fact that you hadn’t left yet
i felt the weight of your head upon my shoulder
your lips were full and so warm and so wet.
you must have felt me shudder
as i broke out in a cold sweat
was it you that i felt tremble
or something that hadn’t come yet.
but as i turned my head to meet your lips with mine
in what i knew was sure to be an exchange of passion
so intense that two people rarely get to experience it
on even a single occasion in an entire lifetime of longing and searching
i heard a not unfamiliar groan and opened my expectant eyes
to see that my fine canine companion of many years and countless sleepless nights
had once again joined me in bed
to prevent me from yet another night of potentially dangerous solitude
and that it was his wet nose and not your moist lips that had sent me into a state of deep and desperate anticipation
that i probably should not dwell on or describe in any further detail
as it will only serve to bring me to a visible and disgraceful conclusion
that will certainly embarrass me even more than things already have.
and as the smell and anticipation of your nocturnal visitation
that was in reality no visit at all
faded as so many like them had before
and as i lay there in my bed, alone
i began to wonder if we’re caught between not really knowing
whether what’s around us and who and what we feel we’re a part of is actually happening
and real
or are our perceived realities just some sort of strange dream-like senses of time and space that we’re suspended in
and maybe life itself is not a true reality at all
but perhaps just a point in space between two infinite particles of time
long in the past and far in the future.
and at times like this when my mind begins to travel to places where perhaps it ought not to go
i decide as always to leave those questions unresolved
rather than having to pursue the full spectrum of vacant thoughts such as these to their ultimate logical conclusion
which i’m sure i’d never be able to arrive at with any feeling of finality or certainty
and which if pursued to the end
might only serve to present me with a version of reality which denies my perceived illusionary realities
steeped in their illusive and temporary, but seemingly superlative, experiences
and thus deny me one of the true pleasures of a mundane existence.
so i roll over, pull my pillow close, secure that another illusion that will come in time unexpected as a transitory wave longing to be ridden until it washes up on shore
spent in a sudden rush of energy spilled upon sand on the vast emptiness of a deserted beach in the middle of nowhere…
c. 2022 Carl Rubino
As It Rolled Down Your Thigh
As we lay there on our backs side by side, looking up at the sky on that humid August morning
Sweet beads of sweat glisten as they roll down the inside of your thigh, bared by the folds of your skirt that fell ever so obligingly almost to the crossroads
Oh how I wish I could roll gently over and follow them to where they are headed
But I know I’m not supposed to think like that, ‘cause I don’t really know you that well and,
Well, because, we haven’t even kissed or held hands yet
But I was just thinkin’
That’s all
Just thinkin’ and wonderin’
c. 2022 Carl Rubino
Lust Is A Luscious Liar
Beauty is a bountiful bandit
A disguised thief in the night
To tempt our tarnished treasures
And plunder them with devilish delight
Lust is a luscious liar
A companion to the temptress of time
The pain of its passing pleasure
Blurs truth to the blind
Sex is a sometimes savage
A companion of compassionate calm
A raging rogue of ill-repute
A discarded dress from a prom
Omnipresence opulent orphans
Like the quests of a quarrelsome queen
Or the pandering of a petulant princess
Demons from your darkest dreams
Like time’s tedious temptress
All leave us left behind
Pride’s passive persuaders
‘Til the final curtain call.
Yes, lust is a luscious liar
And beauty a boisterous beast
c.2023 Carl Rubino
The topics of “Lust, Love & Relationships” are also represented, in a different poetic form, on my “Prose Poems and Flash Fiction” page on this website…Enjoy
Carl Rubino 