Tar Pit

Let's workshop this bitch!

Tar Pit

My cherished reasonableness is to be, is now being,
smashed. To the geese-woven sky in a lawn chair
I look, bundled and yet still freezing. Space debris 
I watch with thrill as it shatters in Barbie Pink dawn.
The winter geese are barking but the tartaned terrier
is silent, not even touching the hunk of boiled beef
when I try to coax him to take it with a cane nudge. 
Well, no: his whine has been so chronic next to me,
next to the wheelbarrow still too loaded with logs,
that it is merely as if he were silent. The paranoia,

so it turned out, was warranted. It was warranted
even though it comforted me in that it meant I was
considered. The thermos, bourbon hot chocolate,
spills into the dirt, earth, as the dog—so needy and so
so needing to get a life like most dogs—struggles
to get underneath my chair. And now even my brain,
a monastery always before, is no doubt defenseless.
Such loneliness would typically have been relocated
to worms, the body long groomed to welcome being
opened into and by that dirt—an end to nail-biting,
 
an end to Purple Rain, an end to Rhode Island, an end
to facial desquamation in this major desquamation, 
an end to tarot bullshit and horoscopes, an end
to pcp-cigarettes, an end to the nursing-bra smell 
and to the taste of your own milk, an end to porn 
to get it up for her, an end to the honing practices
that devour the hours, an end to the going through
the closets of the dead, an end to driveway shoveling
only for the plow to pass by in crushing indifference. 
Well, no: that is a stretch for the sake of attempting

to make the plow a metonym for reality—in truth, 
the driver laughs. Energy will not be relocated 
this time to a youth falling in love. In the rumble,
though, the wheelbarrow empties the logs onto me
and the blanket of weight is comforting, better 
than any death-bed hand and perhaps even better
than pills. We will still get in each other’s way, yes
(as do the strings of a knot). Knots will still form
among us. But the “us” is going to be, after this one, 
wilder than perhaps even scientists have imagined.

*This poem, more surreal compared to my typical work, is unpublished

Photo credit: Gary Gay (garry-gay.pixels.com/)