50/365: Trade or Best Offer

One body, up for grabs.
I've posted this simultaneously
on Craigslist and Kijiji,
so you better act fast.
40 years old,
still with all its fur,
slightly used condition,
minor foxing on the hands and one cheek.
Knows how to cook a good arribbiatta sauce,
has a nose for good reading material,
doesn't smoke or drink,
although some wear due to history with same.
Looking for another model,
will accept male versions,
similar vintage okay.
Trade obo.

49/365: Schmutzie's Butt-zie

There once was a blogger named Schmutzie
who spent a lot of time on her butt-zie.
Eating became inadvisable
when her rear grew so sizable
that her pants would no longer do up-zie.



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The above poem is a limerick.

48/365: Ed Norton Fantasy Poem #6

Ed Norton,
do you sit around in striped boxers
wearing white sports socks?
Or do you wear those thin, dressy socks
with the fancy patterns?
Do you buy your own socks?

I only ask this,
because I had a dream last night
that you were watching tv with me,
and your boxers were striped,
and you'd pushed the heel of your right foot
between the toes of your left foot,
which jambed your socks down
like you'd been wearing them with thongs,
but my dream didn't fill in the sock detail very well.
I think I got sidetracked
when I thought about how
that space between your big toe and second toe
is probably soft and warm, like baby skin.

I bet you get those pedicures
with the little fish that eat your callouses.
If I owned your little foot skin eating fish,
I'd name them all Ed Norton,
because they'd be made of Ed, technically,
and I would sell each one on eBay for only the cost of shipping,
because it would be like a charity for lonely people,
and there would be little pet Ed Norton fishes
in apartments across North America.
In a way, your feet would be a generous wellspring of pet friends.
The lonely people could write them off as health expenditures,
and you would be like Jesus with the loaves and fishes,
only you would be Ed Norton with the dead foot skin and fishes.
You and Jesus, Ed.
Who would've guessed?

So, Ed,
do you buy your own socks?
Do you own your own foot fishes?
Are your boxers stripey?
Am I a love dream prophetess?
Call me.

47/365: Salvation

Salvation lies here:
the silver speckling his beard,
the folds by his eyes.
Age becomes more than defeat
when love bends the years' patterns.



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The above poem is based on the Japanese tanka.

46/365: Venus

Nuclear testing in North Korea
and untreatable tuberculosis in South Africa
and giant asteroids hitting the earth
and the cancer I used to have
leave me gasping in bed,
tangled and sweating,
sure that this might be
the last night
I will lie next to my love.

I kept a blanket in a plastic bag
with a large rock to hold them down
on the roof behind the chimney
when I was eleven,
and every evening, just after dusk,
I crawled across the sandpaper shingles, pebbling my knees,
shushing myself with each audible scrape,
and leaned against the chimney bricks
with the blanket around my shoulders
to watch Venus blinking through the dark.
I invented prayers, I yearned, I pled with black space.
I would go to Venus, I would wait through the night,
and they would come for me,
they who would know me,
the ones who would recognize the vibration in my body
that beat out the beacon of my energetic fingerprint.
They would see it through the pale skin on my naked chest.
The whole night sky could see me.
They would know, they would know.

I think of her, waiting to be found,
and I remember that she, too, used to gasp in bed
and twist in her sheets,
that she sat on that roof wrapped in a stolen blanket
because there was nothing for her on the ground.
The Cold War was going to drop the Bomb,
and everyone's flesh was going to burn,
but the Venusians would be pulled to her.
They would know her fingerprint heaving,
beaming out through the darkness,
hear her heart thumping in time
to the planet's cyclic streaming.

There is always this, though:
reaching for love and fearing its destruction.
Both are inevitable.
We will reach for love,
and we will burn up at the end of our existence,
and I will always be this pulsing fingerprint,
waiting for love with a bare chest
and staring down its chronic vulnerability
to human extinction.