How to Fly a Djinn in Twenty-Four Hours

The speech that I’ve been rehearsing for years,

waiting for the opportunity to deliver in a moment of passion,

convincingly, is the speech I should've made to my younger self

when my younger self didn’t want to hear it.

“Jeanie,” I would say, “Don’t try to be the fastest gun in the East.

Fast guns break into dead runs. Hold your ground with no guns.”

Jeanie’s own philosophy was not normally of the Eastern persuasion.

An expanded horizon meant to her vacation in some exclusive resort.

Indeed her teachers had to resort to multi-colored mandalas, gilded sutras,

and other such visual aides to impress on Jeanie the wisdom of the Orient,

and even then she’d be suspicious of the source.

When it came to words of wisdom,

Jeanie preferred to give rather than take,

but who’d take the word of a genie?

I have my own reasons to doubt the grounds of her authority.

Squeeze into Jeanie’s bottle, and you’ll see shelves

laden with tomes of “self-help” from her past incarnations,

cracked spines and well-worn covers sporting titles such as

“Thick Face/Black Heart,” “Chicken Soup for the Djinn,”

and the classic, “How to Be a Genie in Ten Easy Lessons”

(she got her double-blink from that one).

I’d like to ask the her now, finally,

“If you’re willing to take the instruction of total strangers,

why not mine?” The way of the djinn

is littered with ersatz masters, as I to my grief have found.

Jeanie would never, not in a million years, have listened.

She’d take a new master over an old one any day.

Even if he were not the right one, at least she’d be assured

of having served the latest model. As for masters,

lest we forget, at their beckon there were blond genies

and brown genies, good and bad genies, maple genies, strawberry

genies, pretzel genies, glass, marble, and flesh and blood genies.