Bah!
It is well-past old hat and hurt
When having to feel the hooked barbs
Of who had angled for all of your faith,
All of your confidence, who’d kept insisting
To you that she was the epitome of trust,
While hot screws spun within your soul,
Scoring the life that you’d lived by your wits,
By your word, and the steel-tight bond
That had secured it as a code, for granted.
But don’t you dare define your hurt
Though feeling it from a long ways off,
For years (tipped off by her romance
With speeding on rain-slicked roads,
Her lust for coffee the consistency of mud,
And her icy baby-blues incubating grief),
The hatching of “You haven’t a clue,”
And, “I’m sure that I can look deep
Into your eyes and lie to you without
You ever catching on.”—How shabbily
A rube tries her hand at grifting
And turns into the mark. But how satiny
Is consolation, remembering a black kitten
Rescued from freeze-drying in a snowbank,
At home, warm, dreaming of stampeding mice
She had never seen, her wee panther paws
Paddling the ethereal halo at the bosom
Of beauty, the Belgian Shepherd puppy
That adopted her and was also dreaming,
Her wolf paws fluttering, describing herding
Or corralling rabbits she believed were real.
With control as my quarry, my bristling
Needs working on, but I dream of a lamb
Backing away from its mates that are pushing
To gain ingress down a chute. A belled goat
Stands off to the side with smirking men.
from The Reharkening (Black Mountain Press, NC., 2014)
