The Defective Animal (short poem)

Out of boredom, I trick my dog:
I knock on the wood of my desk
and pretend it came from the door.
“Sic Rocky!”
The dog jumps from the couch,
tail rigid in the air,
barking savagely,
raised hackles,
barred teeth,
ready to tear the invisible intruder to shreds.
There’s no doubt clogging the wheels of this perfect machine,
as they keep turning inside the placenta of causality.  
A dark thought hits me:
The dog barks at nothing thinking it’s something,
But us humans, we bark at nothing
knowing it’s nothing.
us lowly humans,
we’re only capable of
barkings of sighs
and resigned charges.

 

Dry Winter Spleen (poem)

The winter holidays are here, 
psychiatrists are booked solid. 
My co-worker told me
his radiation treatment went well
but that his wife was diagnosed with cancer;
Liver, late stage, spreading.
As if his fear has spread the sickness to her.
He escaped only with diabetes and no thyroid,
no energy.
I looked at him thinking:
is man just a knot of nervous ticks and rotten entrails? 

Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!
A customer told us,
The elderly woman who complained about the price of groceries
was pushed by a junkie in front of the train
and cut in half.
She was wrong she’d die of malnutrition.
On my way home, at the intersection, a collision.
A woman puked in the bag of her face
Spread on the frozen pavement,
Inert lips scraping against the grit,
One dangling eyeball iced in panic,
The other missing.

The winter wonderland is here at last!
At my neighbor’s place,
under the plastic Christmas tree,
the kids counted their bills
smoking, grunting, hissing,
like feral poker players,
while their parents snorted white lines
from unemployment lines.
Back at home,
The eggnog tasted like a long January hangover,
the only buzz was a drill through my skull.
Through my window, suffocating grayness, brown grass.
they reminded me there was no snow this year.
No whiteouts blasting forgetfulness,
no shrouds of ice
to hide us from ourselves.