A List Of Complaints, Oh Sigh

Monday, May 5, 2008

I am always hungry,
but when I eat, even if it is just a little bit,
I feel uncomfortably full,
and my belly distends.
There is this headache, too,
and sometimes it is so shrill
that I become dizzy and exhausted,
but most of the time it is dull and distant,
somewhere indistinct.
The wart on my foot defies all treatment,
and so does this seemingly permanent zit on my chin.
I am so thirsty,
and chilly water is nearly like dessert,
except then I have to pee,
which I find to be an annoyingly endless game of action and consequence.
I have popcorn husks stuck in my teeth
from a bowl of popcorn,
which was unsatisfying to eat
due to its healthful lack of enough butter.
The alarm clock's not gentle,
but then neither are dreams of loss, losing, and departure.
The warm weather is late, summer is short,
and winter is a bitter exercise in remembering to breathe.
The cirrus clouds were ugly today,
like old Halloween cobwebs with no will.
Not even the birds would go near them,
or maybe it was the unpredictable gusts of wind
which blew dust into my eyes that kept them out of the sky.

If only I could love my whining cat more
and afford a maid
and enjoy food and drink without fullness or evacuation
and never have winter or blistering August
and forget dentists
and ban household detritus
and get rid of cheap perfumes that make my eyes swell
and cure cancer
and wander around wherever I like
and get to ride trains for free
and institute three-day weekends
and lie around in a park in the shade of a tree
with a book and a pink lemonade
and watch the baby geese roll like dumplings
as their parents scuttle them away across the lawn,
then it would be that Tomorrow I keep hearing so much about.

Labels: the poetry

comments (9)  ·  permalink  ·  subscribe  · 

In The Field, 1987

Friday, January 11, 2008

You stand in that field
with the spring crop just reaching your knees
where your shorts end.
You have that skin,
the kind we have before we've been in car accidents
and stretched our mouths around other people
and smoked drugs in the outfield,
that kind that plumps over your bones
and takes the sun into itself.
The scrape from the rock you fell against
will taste oily and metallic when you stop to notice it,
and you will hope it will scar before fall.
I can taste it from here.

It was soundless;
at least, that is how I remember it
as I stare at this three-hole punch.
I think the grass scraped edge on edge,
and there must have been that sound of the breeze
running over the well of my ear,
but I do not remember it.
I do remember how far along the field you were
picking at seedheads.
You had forgotten about my following
and fingered yourself absently through your pocket.

I stood there once
with a toy car in my hand,
keeping my distance from the men who rolled wheat heads
and squinted against the dry air blowing off the highway.
One day I would be them, I thought,
and I plotted the cap I would wear
and whether I would chew grain
or let a thin stalk twizzle from my mouth.
That was then.

We are all three deep:
inside, outside, make-believe.
I watch your eyes go inward
while your lips move words to something there
away from the Doppler sounds of moving cars
where your shoulders are not burning
in the high sun.

I am a participant in Read Write Poem and Blog 365.

Labels: the poetry

comments (12)  ·  permalink  ·  subscribe  · 

My First Video, Accompanied By A Haiku

Sunday, December 16, 2007

my first video
is not about a brassiere
but you might think so

I am a participant in Holidailies 2007.

Labels: the poetry, the videos Schmutzie made

comments (15)  ·  permalink  ·  subscribe  · 

The Dear Johns

Saturday, December 1, 2007

When I was a little kid
I thought Dear John letters were just that:
letters addressed to an imaginary person named John
that would never be sent
about things you wanted gone from your life.

I wrote a lot of them.
They said things like:
Dear John, I don't want celery in my soup anymore;
Dear John, I think the organ is tacky and want to take guitar lessons;
Dear John, I wish Leslie went to a different school;
Dear John, they call me Chiclets because of my front teeth.

When I was twelve,
I found out that Dear John letters were for leaving those once loved,
and I realized that I had forgotten love in my Dear Johns,
so I wrote my last letter:
Dear John, I love you;
and I folded the letter into a little box I buried in the yard
and then hid out at the ball diamond
to avoid my organ lessons.


(originally posted at Schmoetry)

I am a participant in Holidailies 2007.

Labels: the poetry

comments (5)  ·  permalink  ·  subscribe  · 

#833: Hello, My Name Is Schmutzie, And I Am Smartarded (aka A Realized Intention)

Friday, October 26, 2007

Today, I am smartarded. That is what the Palinode and I call our cat, Onion, because he is almost not slow and guileless, but not quite. He knows how to get three thousand pets by bedtime but has not figured out how to push open a door in over a year of watching our other cat do it several times a day. He is smartarded.

The insides of my ears hurt, but let's move on from that.

Last night, I dreamt that the cool brush of mild winter-morning air was on my cheek. Everything was a dusty shade of perriwinkle in that moment before the sun broke over the horizon, and I inhaled deeply that scent of fresh, clean snow.

And suddenly, winter does not seem so much like a thing to mourn. For someone like me who has spent every winter of her life in some lesser or greater form of emotional distress, this is heartening.

Of course, the Funny left a little while ago anyway, but I am sure that that may correspond to the pain in my ears.

If you could hear the huge fart noise my cheap pants just made on my office chair, this whole thing would have a different tenor.

This whole thing would have a different tenor if I stopped saying things like "different tenor" and "heartening" and "so much like a thing to mourn". Sheesh. Who am I? Some early 1900s virgin authoress? I should bandy a whilst or two about just to overstuff the fainting couch which this entry has become.

Were we going somewhere? Yes, right, we were. I had an intention floating around here not too long ago, which I tried to weigh down with a stapler, but those intentions are little escape artists they are. Mine's a fugly little bugger who likes to run off with my realizations for twisted inter-wish-verb fornication.

You would think that sort of activity might culminate in the birth of a Realized Intention along the way, but no. When those flighty intentions knock up those self-aggrandizing realizations, what you usually get is sterile as a mule and just as likely to go nowhere.

And lastly, a poem:

With You, It's Always The Poor New-Yorkers

You say, but there's death.
There is hunger and dehydration
and murder and torture.
There are carnivores and weapons.
There is fire and disease.
Cars drive over people,
and the living eat dead food.
Some kids in New York have never
seen a live cow
or walked on soil barefoot
without fear of dirty needles and broken glass.

I want to say that these are only bodies, only bodies,
that we carry them around,
that all of these will go.
In one hundred and fifty years
not one of us will be here
to recognize the face or hair or gait of another.
These bodies are the meat we antagonize,
not the things that flesh them out.
You are confused.

If anything at all,
we are not to be here.
The world despises us
as much as we do any weed,
and we should accept that fact
as much as we accept
that we will kill the mushrooms
that pop up in brief rings before we uproot them
to make way for grass
that we won't allow to grow.

Labels: the poetry

comments (15)  ·  permalink  ·  subscribe  · 

#818: The Traveller

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

She should have sat elsewhere.
I did not like her,
that girl who squeezed herself in
between me and the bench's wooden arm,
with her faux-suede skirt gripping my thigh.
She smelled like the contents of my grandmother's purse -
crushed sucking candies and tissues and discount hand lotion -
and I thought she must be very lonely or European
to press herself so selflessly against a stranger.
Canadians do not touch each other.
She picked at something gummy stuck to her sweater
while I jiggled my leg in time to the clicks of the clerk's tapping pen.

Labels: the poetry

comments (28)  ·  permalink  ·  subscribe  · 

#807: Subterranean Homesick Blues

Sunday, September 16, 2007

If you click on the image below, you can see my words on a segment of Bob Dylan's video for "Subterranean Homesick Blues".

(via Boing Boing)

If you don't mind advertising for Bob Dylan's music, you can make your own version here.

---

UPDATE: The woman behind My Gorgeous Somewhere has sent me her version of the video using her own poetry.

And then, Paper Napkin posted this response to my version.

And pepektheassassin joined in, too, with another version.

That Girl? She got into the action, too.

Labels: the poetry, the videos

comments (5)  ·  permalink  ·  subscribe  · 

#772: This Week's Poem

Thursday, August 2, 2007

From This End

I sleep six days for every one I open my eyes.
I take pictures and then run three days from the source.
Fiction fixes place in time when fact is fleeting,
and all reality's a vanishing point
at the end of a long line of roadside poles.

At least that's how it appears
on the other end of a pen, a lens,
from behind a particular pair of binoculars,
in the news and financial reports,
on the calendar three Sundays from now
where the crow goes long.


(originally posted at Schmoetry)

Labels: the poetry

comments (1)  ·  permalink  ·  subscribe  · 

#764: A Poem, Finally

Monday, July 23, 2007

Red Jacket

At four or five or six years old,
my mother outfitted me with a red jacket
that had a hood and a double pocket on the belly
and a metal zipper that went tick-tick-tick in soft clicks
that could only be heard when you were inside it.

The fleece was on the inside where it counted,
and it had broad, soft elastic cuffs at the wrists
where my mother would stuff tissues
that I used to squash bugs
so that I could see the colour of their insides.
I knew that my insides were red,
but theirs were brown or yellow or green,
unless sometimes if they ate people, like mosquitoes.

I would find that jacket hanging in the closet in the winter,
and I would smell it and push its smooth insides into my face.
It meant things, that coat. Even then I knew.
It was the smell of rain-damp dirt with mashed in pine needles
from the trees way up north,
and my cold, chubby fingers in wet sand on grey days
when my uncle's curse kept the rain close;
it was the musky-sweet smell of rotten foliage
limping into the humic soil
and translucent snail shells snapping easy against
water-worn pebbles no bigger than my smallest fingernail.

That coat is a place.
That coat is a place even at the bottom
of the landfill it was thrown into
after my mother secreted it from the house.
Long from then, now, when I lie in bed,
older and sore and worried,
I am in that coat with fat cheeks
counting the beetle shells
that I have stashed in my sleeves.

Labels: the poetry

comments (6)  ·  permalink  ·  subscribe  · 

#731: This Is Becoming A Semi-Regular Event

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

It Is Not About The Snail

If I start with the snail shell,
you will leave,
but I promise you,
it is not about the snail.

It is about that soft, wet,
not-quite snap of an empty shell
before full dark,
and how your small fingers
push just so, as you have done before,
along the top edge of the curve
where the light shone through in green and gold at noon,
and how it gives way without breaking through
to leave an uneven mosaic
of its once logarithmic spiral.

The water laps the sand into the fine threads it does each night
once the boats have gone to dock,
and the scrape from grit under your nails
is as loud as the shell snap,
is as loud as the high treble of an intake of breath,
is as loud as the sharp, cold zipper on your stomach.

The others have all gone for evening coffee and cards,
and all the crisp things surround you.
This breath is that shell,
your coat is an interloper,
the limp minnows
in the lines that define quiet water
lie in the same space where your shoes are not.

It is a tired light that dims the shell
and pimples the skin
that the wind beat with needles from dry trees;
breathing drowns the quiet
and nightfall the shell,
and you are left with a coat
which will lead you to a home
where clarity is attenuated
by the comfort of beds and things to sleep in.


(originally posted at Schmoetry)

---

Don't Forget: Check out my latest addition, Quick: A News Weekly From March 12, 1951. It's keen.

Labels: the poetry

comments (3)  ·  permalink  ·  subscribe  · 

#721: Someone Named Colleen Deserves A Thank-You

Friday, June 1, 2007

I received a lovely gift a couple of weeks ago, but without an e-mail or website address, I have no other way to thank the person who gifted me other than to thank them here.

Colleen, whomever you are, wherever you are, THANK YOU. For all I know, you could be a sadistic freak who drives chopsticks through the ears of kittens, but based solely on your present of an Amazon.com gift certificate to me, I am going to assume that you save orphaned kittens from trees and nurture them at your own bosom.

I thought that you might like to know how I spent your gift. I picked out The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, and Elizabeth Cotten's "Shake Sugaree", and I love all of them. The poetry by Sexton is especially crazy running through my brain right now, and it will carry me well through my post-surgical recovery.

For a taste of what I've got, listen to Elizabeth Cotten at Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, watch an interview with Alison Bechdel, and read Anne Sexton's poetry:

In Celebration Of My Uterus (an excerpt)
by Anne Sexton

Everyone in me is a bird.
I am beating all my wings.
They wanted to cut you out
but they will not.
They said you were immeasurably empty
but you are not.
They said you were sick unto dying
but they were wrong.
You are singing like a school girl.
You are not torn.

Colleen, again, thank you.

Labels: the metablogging, the poetry

comments (2)  ·  permalink  ·  subscribe  · 

#720: Yo, I Poeted

Thursday, May 31, 2007

The House Is On Fire

This is hard, eating.
It might be better to starve,
and I am left wanting the heroin
that so pickled Burroughs.
It could be muscles and bones,
or it could be squamous cell carcinoma
that gets the goods.
To starve around it,
to tighten up and dry out,
might scare it out like a mouse from a house on fire.

There is a fire in the belly when I drink
like the one that was there when I was twenty-one
and believed in unrequited love.
So I do it now
to forget that mouse in the dark
who makes a nest of my tissues,
gnawing out a space for itself
in which to calculate its multiplication.
It must have sneaked in when I was out.

There was a boy in seventh grade
who gave me a school photo,
which I hid inside the covering of my earmuff.
It was there against my head every day at recess,
and it burned like shame or a loathsome burden
until I took it out and flushed it down the toilet.
The annual winter confession of this act
has never relieved the embarrassment.
Not knowing better
or knowing that you don't know better
will burn down your last straw.


(originally published at Schmoetry)

Labels: the poetry

comments (3)  ·  permalink  ·  subscribe  · 

#713: A Poem

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Remember: I Am Two Things

I know why you look like that
with your brows pressed down over your eyelids
in that cascade of soft flesh made hard.
The cancer is inside me,
but I cannot feel it soaking into my organs in the dark
like you imagine I must.
Your face does that
because you imagine the tumor erasing me,
fading me out into a hairless wisp,
me and my body as one thing taking leave of you.
But I do not feel those fabled fingers gripping my soft tissues;
my body is an ornament around the brain I inhabit.
You see one thing that could leave you;
I see one thing that was never mine
strung around myself, heavy and wet.
If this body must be food,
you would lose two things, I would lose one, and
this fleshly sack would miss nothing.


(also posted at Schmoetry)

Labels: the poetry

comments (17)  ·  permalink  ·  subscribe  · 

Sunday, May 6, 2007

#701: A POEM, IF YOU WILL

The Clay Pot That Emptied Itself

There are few thoughts
in this empty vessel,
steeped in a chemical bath
at the cost of forty dollars a month.

I once worried over timecards
and transportation and shopping and
and where my next cigarette was
inside a dry skull with a dull thud.

Now there are the small, white pills
taken in the morning
before I've given any thought
to this or that or why I'm here;

little, white, divided pills
that smell like paint thinner
stop all the worry and consideration
that once led down endlessly forking roads.

The thoughts that were are gone:
the electric charge of hypotheses,
the rise and fall of battles won
and lost and begun and imagined.

I am left to forage for animal fulfillment
among food and drink and people
to satiate every present, terminal desire.
I am left hard-pressed at day's end

to recall a distinct impression;
There are only rapid snapshots,
soundless, thoughtless scraps of one thing or another
to which I have lost all attachment.


(this poem was originally posted by Schmutzie at Schmoetry)

Labels: the poetry

comments (2)  ·  permalink  ·  subscribe  · 

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

#691: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THERE'S NOT ENOUGH GOING IN

Bitumen

Today the word is bitumen,
of which there is a lot.
For proof, look out your window
at that blacktop parking lot.

Mining based extraction
is a boring subject, yes,
but it's gritty and it's slimy;
it dares a porn trope to a test.

It's a stretch, though, and I've nothing.
The sand is like a beach?
The conveyor belt's a swimsuit
getting sand caught in the breech?

Or the oily sand's a pussy
and the machine's another's hand
and the more it roves and wanders
the oilier the land?

This brings to mind a thought or two
about this earth that we do shape.
We take everything we want to;
it's a veritable rape.

Oh, it's just too tiresome
working this metaphor I seek.
My meter goes from six to eight.
It's forced and sad and weak.

What brought this on, you wonder?
A google search, of course.
I yearned to know of bitumen,
but my mind's dirty, low, and coarse.

So, this is where I've brought you,
an unsatisfying end.
You've learned nearly naught of bitumen
nor found porn aptly rend.

I am sorry for this time I stole.
I wish that it weren't so.
There's been no education
and no sex, not one yabbo.

But bitumen's important.
Please take that fact to heart.
It kept Phoenician ships afloat
Even if your sands it did not part.

Oh, but wait, I've found a moral
to this long-winded monologue:
Just because your sands are oily
you've not okayed more than a snog.

The earth cannot consent
to the machines that mine her ground,
But we can fight the patriarchy
Until our freedom's won and sound.

So in the end the bitumen
was a decent little start.
I hope you've found some worthwhile bit
to take when you depart.

(This one's for triskaidekaphobes
who need not fear thirteen verses.
This one is the fourteenth
to avoid the evil curses.)

Labels: the poetry

comments (2)  ·  permalink  ·  subscribe  · 

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

#687: THE CRAZY WRITES A POEM

I am sitting here eating a yogurt and granola parfait, feeling particularly everything. I'm not sad or happy or tired or excited. I am everything. Everything is the mood, and I can't shake it.

It's all my fault, too. Since I started taking an anti-depressant sometime around January, I have always taken it at night, because when I started taking it, it made me feel light-headed and I spoke like I was yelling and my tongue dried out. It was best to take it at night and sleep through the side effects. A couple of mornings ago, though, I realized that I had not taken it in two days, because I never remember at night when I'm tired and nodding off over a plate of re-heated asian food in front of an episode of "Law & Order".

So, I came up with a new plan of action. I decided that I would take it in the morning, because at that time of day I am less likely to fall over sideways and land face down in a pile of the Palinode's pillows when I am halfway through a magazine article. That sort of thing makes not taking my medication a foregone conclusion. I woke up yesterday morning and took the drug right on the new schedule, but this morning I didn't, because I never take drugs in the morning. This means that I have only taken my brain meds once in the last four days.

Who needs to take their medication for the crazies more than once in four days? Who? I bet you can guess. ME, THAT'S WHO.

I feel at once flat and hyper aware. Perhaps I am turning into a psychopath. Although, I don't really think so, because when my beloved stapler jambed earlier, I felt bad and tried to extricate the twisted staples from as quickly as possible so that it could go back to its stapling ways. It didn't like being jambed, you see. I felt sad for it.

The biggest sign that I am off today, and by "off" I mean "verging on nutjob", is the poem I concocted in my head while on my way to buy this lovely yogurt and granola parfait I am forcing down in spite of the distasteful grittiness of the blackberries. You may read this poem and get the impression that Omigod, she wants to touch old lady boobs!, but that's really not what I was thinking about. I was thinking about the deliciousness of bacon and all the things with which bacon goes well, and then I remembered something that I had heard about goat cheese wrapped in bacon, which is now all I want for my next meal, because, holy frack, GOAT CHEESE! BACON! I was thinking this while walking down a hallway when a lady with droopy boobs walked by wearing a sweater that accented her droopy-boobedness. It was one of those you-got-your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter moments, except that I just happened to get-her-boobs-in-my-bacon-thoughts.

Hold that image for a moment. Now hold it. Hold it. Hold it. Okay. Exhale. Let it go.


Why I Should Take My Medication Regularly, Exhibit A:

Droopy-boobed Lady, Let's Go Get Some Bacon-wrapped Goat Cheese Together

Droopy-boobed lady,
let's go get some bacon-wrapped goat cheese,
because that sweater you're wearing,
tied up the way it is under your breasts,
shows off the soft fall of old flesh,
and I want to be near that.
I know what the pearlized scars from change
look like on my thighs,
but I want to see those lines thin,
long and corrugated in toward one another,
ranging down your skin toward the nipple.
I would brush against those fine hairs
and roll soft skin between my thumb and forefinger
where it would feel papery and light as refined silk.
They would fall and hang apart against your belly,
looking this way and that,
less focused since they lost their fat,
and I would hold them together to see
where one was darker, more dimpled, harder.
But first, droopy-boobed lady, we'll do this right
and you and me'll go get some bacon-wrapped goat cheese together.


As a result of the above evidence, I promise, pinky swear, cross my heart and hope to die on my mother's grave, that I will take my medication when I go home. I will put the crazy down and step away from poetry. I swear it, because I have seriously disturbed myself.

Labels: the crazy, the poetry

comments (9)  ·  permalink  ·  subscribe  · 

Saturday, March 31, 2007

#675: MY THIRD POEM THIS MONTH

Fuck but youth is beautiful
in its exercise and practice.
There is no replacement for the irreplaceable, unpaced mash
that is the face full of watery plumpness
framing pink lips.
Damn, I used to be there,
and I hated it; it was ugly, salacious, loud;
I wished there were a turnstile
through which I could walk and purchase a different form of transport.
I desired
and was repulsed by the suggestive twist in every shape and event;
I wanted Plato's pure form;
I wanted simplicity scrubbed clean.
I scoured my skin with a green plastic scrub pad
and wished that I knew more than how not to live.
I waded through tall grass and bushes,
I felt the sting of nettles on my knees,
and it made me feel old.
Youth was fucking beautiful
when I watched others turn their hips at corners and doors
or brush their fine hair back from fat skin
with ripe hands.
I knew that my own youth was also watched
and that it was not mine to pickle in
but something to behold in the round bottoms and lean legs,
the soft chins of the freshly suckled,
a thing to watch and shape an appetite
my own light walk could not inspire.


(originally posted at Schmoetry)

Labels: the poetry

comments (3)  ·  permalink  ·  subscribe  · 

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

#665: A 30-MINUTE POEM

So, what of it?
I like to smoke dope
and get stupid in the middle of the night.
I swear it keeps me young,
or at least forgetful,
which is like being young,
because you don’t know as much then,
although I thought I knew everything,
just everything.
Back then I always felt like
I was on the verge of becoming famous.
We were all going to be discovered;
we were going to make great strides
in world-changing fields of study
and people would take our pictures
and talk about us years later like we knew what we were doing.
The problem was
we were all so good at everything
that we ended up doing everything mediocre.
Now I wish I had been like one of those kids
you know, those savants,
who play the violin like a master
but never advance beyond stick figures with anything else.
That way, you, me, that other guy,
we’d all be something,
at least something bigger
that would have people know our names.
But I'm okay with this now.
I mean, I get to hang out,
do pretty much as I please.
My mother used to ask me
why are you always jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire
when you shouldn't even be in the frying pan in the first place?
I guess that's how I got here,
but it's not so bad, uh uh.
Least I know that I've got talents, more than one.
I could do just about anything.


(originally posted at Schmoetry)

Labels: the poetry

comments (7)  ·  permalink  ·  subscribe  · 

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

#655: SING ALONG WITH SCHMUTZIE!

Today was Colposcopy Day. I found the whole thing nerve-wracking, and how do I deal with being nerve-wracked? I make up lyrics to the tune of "My Favorite Things" à la "The Sound of Music" while watching my cervix being poked, dyed, and sliced on closed circuit television, of course.


Long aseptic halls and staff in white smocks
An admissions desk and new out-patient docs
Waiting rooms peppered with old magazines
These are some things from my cervical screen

An open-backed gown and blue paper slippers
Nurses in clogs and a gyno so chipper
A speculum shoved where the sun's never been
These are some things from my cervical screen

Stirrups with covers and a high padded table
Vinegar washes and my cervix on cable
A cup of OJ and digestive Peek Freans
These are some things from my cervical screen

When the acid burns, when the stick scrapes, when they dye it brown
I wait for the biopsy and count ceiling tiles and then, due to cramps, bear down

Labels: the body, the poetry

comments (16)  ·  permalink  ·  subscribe  · 

Sunday, March 4, 2007

#652: ANOTHER POEM ABOUT SUBURBAN CHILDHOOD

That grass you're showing off
lies in long lines of light and dark
along the green,
snipped and shaped and fertilized
into an outdoor carpet
that requires special shoes with nubs
and carts with soft wheels.

Your bedrooms have closed doors and heavy drapes
and secret drawers,
suckers that have you lick the clothes off naked people,
and magazines full of ladies with heavy breasts called pendulous
lie in and on clean and modern furniture
while the bedskirt hides the shoes.

There were sparkles on the plastic flowers
and sparkles in your see-through plastic summer footwear
and sparkles in the stippled ceiling,
the ceiling to which I would never refer out loud,
because stipple was far too close to nipple,
and God knew what my thoughts were.

In those days, I was made to wear dresses on Sundays,
and although I pretended to be a co-conspirator,
they were too straight and clean,
and my nylons made me horny
when they bunched to one side in the car
on the way home from church.
I liked how wrong it was to want the painful stick
of my damp legs stuck to tan vinyl
in the Buick's hot back seat
and how the red impressions on my thighs
would burn all through Sunday dinner.

Come dear Lord and be our guest
was the prayer before consumption
in the days when asking for grace meant automatic receipt
and I didn't know that gravy was a violent reduction,
Jesus was the co-conspirator,
and I was to be an outdoor carpet with secret drawers
in the suburban mould.


(originally posted at Schmoetry)

Labels: the poetry

comments (3)  ·  permalink  ·  subscribe  ·