Holly Day
　

First Winter

I spent all last winter listening
to mice chewing through the woodwork
in my kitchen, nesting in the walls, got so
every rustle in the corner of my eye
was a fat, gray rat.

I began to understand Lovecraft
the crazy behind "The Rats in the Walls"
could see how the constant nibbling
and scratching could drive a person
to cannibalism, mad.

Sometimes, if I turned the heat way up
they'd crawl through the walls and
go to someone else's apartment
and it would be quiet and calm
but ninety fucking degrees.
So this year, I got a cat.

　
I Won't Loose This

this morning my son carried his teddy
bear by the arm and talked to it for
almost a whole hour and when he was
done playing he set it in a chair carefully
and kissed it on the nose and waved
goodbye to it before running away
to chase the cat and fuck you if
you're too hard-core and jaded to care.

and this afternoon he rode his toy
horse all around the kitchen wearing
his orange plastic sunglasses and when
he was done he got off the horse patted
it on the head and tried to put his
sunglasses on it and fuck you if
you think I'm getting old and boring I
wouldn't trade this for anything in the world.

-both previously published at Electric Acorn

　
Violins

Always, always had it worse. One of my bad days
Is a minute in your life. One minute. Experience
means nothing next to your daydreams. Nothing is
sacred in your head.
Our love is not a church,
because if it was
We'd be draped head to toe in white robes, always
And not just that one day.

Sometimes I think I'm lost without your sickness
a hard rule to set my own life against
I have tried so hard to smooth over rough edges
that I did not cause and can not heal. If our love
was a church, you could look into my eyes, and I
into yours wouldn't have to do everything with the
lights off, fists clenched tight.

　
Underground Tubers

sometimes when I'm madly masturbating
I think about what it would be like to be a
man, to have a cock, this thick hard piece
of throbbing rubbery meat swinging to and
fro, bumping into things insinuating itself
into everything from love to lunch

my crazy imaginary penis has this need to
be pushed into things, pulled out of things
unclogging drains and investigating cisterns
waving traffic through intersections and
rescuing crying kittens treed in trees

and sometimes when I'm madly masturbating
I imagine the ecstasy of shoving that hard cock
into something alive, not just funnel cakes filled
with fresh cream not just flannel hats or leather
shoes or scotch tape rolls but something twitchy,
and warm, and wet what it would be like to ram
and thrust instead of always being the catcher

-both previously published at Ghoti