[Another surreal poem/prose; meant to be dark]
Thin ice today. Okay, maybe only thin to me. Minus seven degrees of separation, I step through the window in the wall of the bathroom. I am now in another zooming room. I say “This is cold.” Through the broken glass window, jagged edges bleeding. Wearing old winter gear from fifty years in the past, I feel I’m on thin ice as if skating on a frog pond. Back home a hundred years have passed. The pond was never so deep to swallow me whole but its black, black depths pull me under. Entering the amalgam of the earth’s core. Who is that crazy woman sitting at the dining room table.
My mother or me.
I sat there once, at
the table, not the place
by thin ice,
but by the window.
That was her place. She erased identities.
Plum dragons leapt from the middle of the garden. Black asps entertwined with tortured metal. Jump ship the captain shouted before being swallowed legs and arms sticking out of the mouth’s edges in the trench. I did this before leaving no turn unstoned, no worms, no grubs, no leaches leaving behind unkind stenches, no attachments black and burning, no snail left unswallowed, no mother sitting at the table then stepping through the window in the wall, a breach of contract about living when falling from and through the attic floor when our house had no attic. What a day, what a day thee and me did the doo-opp. A laying down of the right mind in the mud thick with worms and beetles, caressing each carapace, popping it into the kettle popped worms and scorched beetles, popping into the mouth, no beetle left unturned, squirming, squiggling, no nonsense retching out to another to ask why and wherefore and what come uppance about this world, your lost keys inserted into you hipskin pocket, surgery not needed just wrench into the hip as you step through the dining room window then climbed to the attic on another starwell, a shortcut through your girlfriend’s apartment.
The only thing
I regret is
I should have
talked to her.