Life is an atrocity
We are angry we are shocked
Life is graceful
Spiderweb lines
We weave
Symbolic sounds
We weather
Whatever together
We sing so silly
We write so weird
Whenever we pleasure
To make a beautiful thing
Out of something sinister
We cling to it with desperate hands
But with no meat on our bones
It slips through
Our skeleton fingers.
They turned over and over again
In their conversation
What exactly was wrong
With their less successful, more flawed family
(the ones not present)
They discussed why and how
But mostly what.
All the things they were doing wrong
All the choices they were making wrong.
Implicitly entrenching their own identities
As the socially accepted
Correct ones
The ones who make the right choices
The ones who know what to do
The ones who are
Better at least
Than these other ones.
Pity is their imagined superiority.
Anger is where they were bruised.
Yep, another cat poem. I can’t help writing about them. They’re always sitting on me.
The cat is simmering on my legs
A tub of purring fur.
My feet are toasty
In the blanket cave underneath her magma belly.
Toasty feet are happy feet.
This heat could never burn me.
Bound and gagged
I try to reach you
Stretching my soul
My eyes linger, plead, accost
You turn my way
But your eyes are closed
You are absent.
Try try try try try
I can get through to you somehow
I must
You are the only one
Who can free me
I age.
The restroom is up a flight of stairs.
Relieved to see it unoccupied,
I trundle my weight up.
Gasses leak before
I ever reach the door.
I am reminded of old man Charlie.
He too would emit
On the ten yard trip across the room,
The bathroom far too distant
For aged cheeks to fight back
The wayward brew,
Which only a diet rich
In vegetable margarine and sauerkraut
Might engender.
And how will my diet appear
To the next generation
What poor choices of today
Will be paid for
In tomorrow’s intestinal distress?
I make it to the stall without trouble
No emergencies here.
I am still young enough.
I even have time to peer out the window
At the bright sidewalk below.
Just in time to see
Two girls with long legs
Long legs
Legs like herons
Did girls always have legs like that?
Graceful, lean, sun kissed fresh
They talk to one another as they pass
Of girlish things;
unaware of the vulture eye
Two stories above them.
Sarah D. Silvey 