The Cerebral Catalyst

Two dead Gemini angels whose brilliance shines on. Freddy Fender and Lisa Lopes. "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights" one of the first songs I remember hearing can still see my parents' eight-track tape with his picture on the label. Admired the beauty of Lisa Left-Eye Lopes the best kind of beauty the kind with character and personality behind it. "I seen a rainbow yesterday" one of the best lines in any song I've ever heard. Singing "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights" at the frozen daiquiri karaoke bar on Beale Street in Memphis. Watching the Lisa Lopes documentary seeing HATE carved into her arm thinking how she reminds me of my cousin Wendy, my favorite person in the world when I was eight. Two dead Gemini angels who have nothing and everything to do with the pain I am carrying around like the first little pig's brick laden wheelbarrow. Two lights. This is to say I want to be a light. This is to say I want to shine. I want to glow in a dark world where mothers put their babies in

microwaves hang their babies in trailer house closets drown their babies in bathtubs chop off their babies' arms shoot their babies because the married man they are fucking doesn't want any complications and maybe someday he'll marry you if you keep fucking his brains out and writing bullshit Hallmark poems and delivering the mail. I want to be a rainbow in this thundercloud ugly world of dead soldiers dead civilians rich politicians hurricane victims dying in their own excrement while the rich and fabulous buy lattes on Rodeo Drive. I want to let my light shine in the midst of lies like flies all over cheap coffins promises not delivered truth swept under cheap rugs babies being born into a cockroach crawling polar bear drowning human rat in the stark white maze teased by the scent of the invisible cheese world. I want to be a billion burned out stars still being wished upon by kids in trailer parks kids in the barrio kids in the ghetto kids on the veldt waiting for the

shipment to come in. I want to be the last cigarette the soldier smokes in the bunker the last light he sees. I've got to contribute some kind of radiance some kind of the show ain't over until the credits roll. People can say She Burned Bright, The Poor Bitch. Someone like me alone in some college dorm starving for tacos and passion can read my words and be saved instead of eaten slowly by the pitch-black void. Bones will always be crunched but look at that carnival blazing away with its Ferris wheel and purple poodles and candy apples and ecstatic screaming riders rocked and whirled to trashy pop metal songs. Look at that big fat white moon. That is not a sneer on its face. It is a sad smile, a benevolent smile, the smile of a patient mother. The children will grow however they will grow. I want the children to play hide and seek bathed in my beams. There is something at the end of a vodka darvocet Billie Holiday lone candle night. There is something beyond suicide and

self-pity and self-inflicted scars. The sun is a bitch that keeps popping back up. I want to be that bitch.

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Misti Rainwater-Lites wants to star in zero budget horror flicks when she grows up. For now she writes a lot of poetry and plays Monopoly with her husband. He usually kicks her ass.

posted 11.05.07.

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