bitten

Sometimes when I come home and the cats are spooning on my bed, I'm jealous.

February

Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It's his
way of telling whether or not I'm dead.
If I'm not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He'll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It's all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we'd do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it's love that does us in. Over and over
Again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and the pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You're the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

-Margaret Atwood

revenge

You're up past your bedtime.
Is it because of the moon? Or is it because on the way home I ran instead of walked? Or the hour someone spent running their fingers through my hair (it doesn't happen often enough), the dark chocolate from the factory tour (who could fault me?), the newspaper clipping you slipped into my desk drawer?
I'm always dividing the world into threes.

The detox will probably take a while, and this makes sense.
My motivation--revenge--only makes sense when I'm looking backward.

His lips are full, but to play he must fold them in,
make a tight line of those wet curves. It is shocking
to see them sprout out again when he finishes playing a long
note, takes a breath. The sound he produces is never thin
enough,
cannot express I am a lost nymph in the woods without adding,
a voluptuous nymph at that. He has tried to take the wink
out of his playing, read the most obscure books on the subject,
even one filled with circus metaphors: Think tightrope; but
he is
always down in the sawdust, slapping a seal, pinching the
plump
curves of an acrobat. The audience loves or hates him,
there is no in-between. Those who pick at their programs
wish his solo were over, others cross their legs thinking he
would only
have to look at a bundle of green twine and it would burst
into flower.
Both flute and clarinet become breathless in their attempts to
outdo him.
The conductor who approached the podium resolving to
rein him in
abandons his brisk baton strokes, succumbs to swaying.
And the oboist, who has been whispering his sins into that
dark
wooden tube hoping for absolution, flinches as the house lights
come up, hearing want echoed back in each footstamp, each
clap.

-Matthea Harvey

ah ha

i need more jazz in my life.

confidence

I might pretend I don't feel well, even though I'm strong as ever, just so no one minds when I spend the evening in bed.

And you might stop by to visit anyway, not minding the blankets pulled up to my chin, and sit down on the floor next to me and talk for three hours about melancholy and the end of the world and elections.

When you say, 'I feel like I'm never going to be great!' I bite my tongue so I don't say, 'me neither, but I honestly don't mind,' because the last thing I want to do is bring me back into the picture.

It's one of those days when your best friend tells you, 'I've never seen you like this--you're being so vulnerable,' and you wonder what the hell is wrong with you to never have been been vulnerable before.

The New Me

I adored my home, so I burnt
it to the ground
and slept in ashes.
I worshiped the moon, so I embraced
cold earth.

My dog was irreplaceable,
so I dropped him in wilderness
and drove away,
watched him grow small in the mirror
watching me.

Traveling was my life,
so I abandoned my car in weeds,
sheared my wings,
slashed my feet,
moved forward on my belly.

I loved you above
all others. So I betrayed you,
left clues crumbled
for your pillow, waited
beneath our garden's unturned stones.


- Gaylord Brewer

A Color of the Sky

Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,
driving over the hills from work.
There are the dark parts on the road
when you pass through clumps of wood
and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean,
but that doesn't make the road an allegory.

I should call Marie and apologize
for being so boring at dinner last night,
but can I really promise not to be that way again?
And anyway, I'd rather watch the trees, tossing
in what certainly looks like sexual arousal.

Otherwise it's spring, and everything looks frail;
the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves
are full of infant chlorophyll,
the very tint of inexperience.

Last summer's song is making a comeback on the radio,
and on the highway overpass,
the only metaphysical vandal in America has written
MEMORY LOVES TIME
in big black spraypaint letters,

which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.

Last night I dreamed of X again.
She's like a stain on my subconscious sheets.
Years ago she penetrated me
but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,
I never got her out,
but now I'm glad.

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature's wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It's been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.


~Tony Hoagland

You never have to worry that my feet are cold. I'm barefoot in January because they're not.