widdershins

ed. note - this is a combination/revision of two poems found below.  please excuse the repetition - they just seemed to work really well together.


and so today was a
slow itemization of things
that turned against me:

i woke from a dream-tossed sleep

into a pellucid morning,
fear dripping into my veins

from the invisible machine
of nightmare,

had to turn the light on
and stare at the shadows

until they melted back,

outside,

the necessary cigarette
left me
as always

unsatisfied



and doing nothing

was justified by 
reducing it to

small somethings,
like reshuffling the books
because the spine of The Idiot
is smaller than that of 
The Devils,

and i don't know,

maybe i felt something

a little like sympathy,



and then
the cat hissed at me
though i had done nothing,
and i saw my fear
reflected in her eyes,

a weird shimmer

like the lake of heat

you might see
over summer asphalt,



for a damned second,

heart pulpy in my mouth,
i stood staring at
the ridges of her palate,
thought how they looked like

the marks the waves make
in the sand at the beach

i rubbed my tongue over my teeth
and prepared to hiss back,

but the rumble and mutter of a truck
shoving by importantly

on the street outside

sent her fleeing
for the nearest couch.



the sun went behind a cloud
and didn't come back -
amateur Houdini –
i am jealous
despite my scorn

then,

now,

this,



and i say to myself
this is one of those days,
an exhausting pageantry of hours
whittling myself to a sharp point
& by the time i’m drunk
i jab at anyone
who comes close enough

& my friend says
i drive people away,
says through a froth of drunk
and pot,
and later we sit
on his couch,
like a couple of knives
rasping in a drawer.

by the end of it
we have dulled each other
and the window is repainting itself
with a fragile blue

& the birds are
going apeshit in the trees -