Absurd realism
religious rats feed on fears
of paper tigers
Save profits cut lives
greedy ticks gather gold from
the teachers classroom
Wealthy plagues our poor
gentrified inner city
while farmlands poisoned
Democrats are just
closeted republicans
both dancing on graves
The new Pied Pipers
in golden pockets
living on decay
A grim fairytale
where children die, cry and starve
as bloated rats gorge
Call me beer drunk from a baseball game
don’t mention how we haven’t talked in months
smile in a cap and ask me to cut your hair
cut your bangs
Do things alone
tell me you’re learning it’s okay to do things alone
what I want to know is then why are you calling me
and that makes you laugh
Please don’t drive drunk home
because there is some comfort in responsibility
keep trying to get me to guess what your turmoil is
trust me I know
Return to the woods
sit at a fire and let a friend scoff at you for talking to me
make pad thai on a camp stove
be okay for now
it is easy to get used to a scar
forget its initial cry and instead
find the magic of a hero
in its permanency
though only yesterday i learned
to flour the sides of a slice
of butter and build a bed of lemon
for a good meal overdue
one is a mark on the body
the other the mind and
until i’m an old woman
both will be a part of me
sometimes i aint got nothing to offer.
i extend the meat from my mouth
because it is demanded i do not keep it to myself,
but it’s wetness is only met with flame
so i roll it back into my skull
and buckle my body closed
breezes only stand to make flames grow taller
even when they wish to be storm enough to extinguish
How quickly it came.
You were here only hours.
I hear phantoms of your laughter.
Glimpses of our games.
I tidy up the room.
Wishing for one more encore.
What I am trying to say is,
I miss you!
“You aren’t a prize”
I felt
about myself
inspite
of boundless love
“We are all prizes
…but like…
carnival prizes
that feel sticky
in that one spot
on the butt”
I feel now
while trying
to keep
my butt clean
If you would be Helen,
I would be king,
I would be Paris,
I’d be any given spartan out of a thousand ships’ worth.
You don’t see me,
but my sun and moon are grade-A dark amber, sticky-sweet and clear as the water if you shine a light on them-
will you wring the brine from my lungs one more time?
You don’t see me,
but your breath is hot at my back.
Two thousand years ago,
if I found you,
at Attica, or Rhodes, or any dot in the Aegean,
would you be torchlit marble, pure and cold as the driven snow? No.
You are the vines on the wall,
you are the knock at my door,
you are grapes like ashes, daisies in the hair of a sleeping child-
You don’t see me,
but I am the tangent and you are the curve and if you will only let me,
I will glance across your bow at only a single point in space, for only a moment, so impossibly brief-
that neither of us will even have to know if it happened or not.
Before Christmas
we adopt a little black cat
with yellow eyes.
Within a few days
he starts sneezing
and has a runny nose.
I take him to a vet
and he gets a little better, then worse.
Another trip to the vet
and then he stops eating.
My son loves him so much.
I put tuna in his mouth
and use a medicine dropper
to give him milk
to try to keep him alive.
Early one morning
his yowling wakes me.
He is freezing and can’t stand.
I put him on a heating pad
then we go to an emergency vet.
There is nothing they can do
and we’ll have to euthanize.
They offer us a room
where we can say goodbye.
My son cries, stroking the cat
and I cry watching him.
The cat dies there
on his own.
