Thurs, 9/5, at work

I am a house
maybe two or three stories tall


The way I feel sad
is a cat in the window
passively looking out
sometimes licking its paws


Every once in a while
The cat grows enormous
Too big to fit in the house
Bigger than the garden out back
Taller than the two or three stories of me
the size of a quarter of the block
even

maybe


It doesn’t stalk off
It won’t give chase
With one lift of a forepaw
it’ll climb atop the roof of me
and then
the most slowly possible
it sits
Even slower than that
the tail is curled
shrouding the whole of me


Nothing gets out
nothing reaches in
Not a trickle of rain
Not a speckle of sunlight
Not even a gasp of air
For a time being

The Resourcefulness of Ants

I am not runned down
No, I am not ragged
Certainly I have been at sea
Yes, I could be found
at any given time
Wiggling out my whole life
at the bottom of all the interchangeably deep, long, & unfathomable valley in existence
as if my own completely meaningless & perfectly purposeful line of impossibly tiny ants

But in my heart is my home and I know where I’m going¹
I know how to find food, over and over again²
I can smell death, all the time³
And I have always known how to heal injuries and perform amputations⁴

No, I do not feel lost
Yes, even when I find myself at sea

FOOTNOTES

1) From the French National Center for Scientific Research: Ants Have a Mighty Sense of Direction

2) From the Proceedings of the National Academy of Scienes: Chaos-order transition in foraging behavior of ants

3) From LiveScience: Ants Can Smell Death

4) From The Smithsonian: Carpenter Ants Perform Life-Saving Amputations to Treat Leg Injuries

No Working Title

Be careful when you go
looking for the painful, improbable answer
to the question of forgiveness

You might end up
taking someone
who never meant to go there

Be careful when you go
on long, difficult searches
for what you think you deserve

Be so careful,
that you don’t end up
with nothing left to mourn
what you lost along the way