Thursday, September 2, 2010

2

to the world for whom I wash my hair at all,
mom is celebrating the hurricane with six beers,
lamenting humidity, and if she could fake a memory
it would be accepting that date proposal
from the future owner of Kellogg’s
(when she worked on the ship in the 70’s).

that never happened and instead there are fingernails
on battery receipts in my wire trash can,
airbrushed cats on cans of cat food.

there is nothing wrong with humidity
but that’s not the point.

I want to ignore that something in the face of poetry
is too smug and holding hands with the pressure
to achieve some staggering self, some steady parade
of bloated selfhood, I want to say what I heard in a dream,
that my fingertips end where the real thing begins but

I do have a name,
or what my mother called me when first I appeared,
and before I suspected the impossibly narrow space
in which to alternate between

keeping a safe distance from the facts that hang rudely above our heads
or
recoiling in classic horror at our options: A.M., P.M.

or loving the facts:
engineered cats and receipt literature,
although the second you close your eyes
you let the spiders braid your hair

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