In Miami, life becomes a fictional reality.
Everything appears in animation.
Miami is The Underworld where lost souls go to battle their demons.
Miami is where pampered, educated suburban Latin girls with big egos can go to understand what it is like to be a black man trying to make a living.
Miami is my muse…I don’t have to be creative there…all the stories are right there in your face, and all you have to do is transcribe.
It’s true what they say about My Ami
She’s hot
She’s curvy
She triggers all 7 vices in just one shot
I LUSTED for green
I tangoed with GREED
I fell into a vat of SLOTH and Publix carrot cake GLUTTONY
Had too much PRIDE to admit I had massive penis ENVY…
They tried to warn me in the sleepy hollows of Disney Bible belt monotony,
But I said, “Whatever,” and sped down I-95, where rush hour traffic ignited my WRATH around, around, around the hurricane blows, whirling, whirling, the energy goes…
“Brrooooop!”
Inside the vortex of My Ami…I open my eyes and who do I see?
A Miami Millionaire in an office folded somewhere inside the yellow brick Roads…
He needs a writer to edit copy for his boiler room toads..
He needs a writer, but he criticizes the state of my fingernails and toes.
“Get a manicure, sheesh,” he says with a NY accent.
“Whatever,” I say as I take a $3,000 check from him in the parking lot and roll my eyes at his red Ferrari.
“That is like so My Ami…
Are you aware there’s a war?
Do you recycle or care to buy eco?
I’m doing my part,
I just protested the war in San Francisco -
Vrooom. Zooom. zooooooom.
“Woooaaaah! Ooooh. Ooo. Oh.
Um. No. That wasn’t fun, take me home.
Vrooom. Zooom. zooooooom.
Oooh! Woow! Ha ha! Weeeeee!
Heeey! Stop that! OK, I’m going home to write about politics now.
Shopping at Merrick Park?
Oh puuuuleeazzzze. I don’t buy STUFF.
You are such a consumer.
No, I don’t want those watches.
No, I don’t want that foot massager.
Well, at least give me the receipt…”
I criticized the commercial art in Wynwood
I wanted to buy the art in Wynwood
I huffed and hawed at real estate developers
Their advertising dollars paid my mortgage downpayment
I became a devil
I became a witch
I became a propaganda machine girl
They say you become what you are around
A socialist-turned-capitalist
Whirling from hood to hood
Mistaking lust for love
Compromising trust for fun
A hippie that once held flowers now shooting a gun
For only here in this corner of Bermuda’s triangle,
So far from San Francisco and the hillbilly panhandle,
The fiction I watched in suburbia
Is real life
rubbing, rubbing, rubbing the sensitive tip of Florida’s peninsula
until oooo! ahhhh! ooooh!
Wait.
The story’s only halfway done…
Can I get a little advertising?
“Well…in this bad economy…”
I stare at her sleeping in the middle of the night
I listen to her breathing hoping she and I will sync up right
I want to stay, I don’t want to let her go…
I cry but she doesn’t know
I apply for shit jobs
I wait on the unemployment line next to Harvard grads
I wait for the phone to ring
It does, but it’s three time zones away
I’ve been sucked into another vortex…
Spinning up and up and up through the glass ceiling
Ready to blast off into another dimension
I have to pause…
And take another look at my Magic City
She taught me well
She gave me the hard lessons I needed
She loves me and now it’s time for me to get the work done
So I’m going away for rehab
I’m going to work for her military style
I’m a Femmebot
Shooting the contents of my mind
Through the only medium understood by macho My Ami
Gotta get two chess steps ahead
Broooooooooop!
- Melanie Feliciano
Biscayne Writers, Inc.
