Laundry

31 December 2014

I had laundry in the dryer

back home

when I asked the beautician to trim my lashes.

With a pair of manicure scissors,

"the better to see you with,"

"the better to polish the floors with" because the

basement was dusted with caking cat litter.

I had my whiskers sterilized and

laminated---

or so I had thought---

so that I, too, might

lie between the open slats of an air vent

on the floor.

Plucked dry and bathed 'til raw,

a ceramic bowl painted with

sylvan scenes from which images of

metal were excluded.

The lions

padded softly at night---when I was

on the wooden "hammock"---

into the mud room, (muddy drawers)

and salivated---

or did they drool?---

sour fluid still sticky and mute (mutating,

mutilating,

hot, yet

cool to the touch as rubber) onto

my garments---(more like tube socks and

childhood swimsuits) dripping rich from tufted jowls

stinking, steaming but I had already

had my nose hairs removed.

("Slather a starch mixture on the

nostril walls," they must

have said in the beauty parlor!)

Pleading, posing, pissing myself

after twenty hours in the same

contorted position, one

foot in my ear and the other in

some strange relative's mouth.

It is not a matter of cylinders but a

matter of placing, a

matter of pushing.

(the hallow of the toilet paper roll

neatly shielding the false golden bar that

"supports" it---

accessibility versus tangibility versus

tables and chairs)

Squares! Squares,

squares become cubes become pillars of

stone, rectangular, jagged and

tasting of bone,

melting (transfusing, transfixing, transmitting and

porting) and courting the

loose-hanging suit of thin skin left

flapping in

the wind.

Maybe cardboard boxes are not old trees or

new bicycle parts but ugly

cardboard boxes, ugly foul-smelling

printed-on folded up board

teeming with packing peanuts and

nothing else! How

bemusing it is to laugh at one

self.

I was but an orange, but a

housecat sailing down the river on an

eggshell,

now sunken and drunken on

Cough Syrup Gourmet.

And an eggshell!---

bobbing tirelessly on the face of

the water,

today reminds me that

there are many variations on white.

Separate your colors and PUSH TO

START.

Author's Note

I took a break from poems for a few months. I was "under the weather" and, I decided, unfit to write. Bear with me.