On the Day
of My Cancelled Surgery
A lump just under my skin snowballed
into twelve doctor visits costing me $3000.
After a wait that felt like a year on death
row,
I sit in a hospital gown, my face flushed,
head nearly bursting, needle in a vein
on the back of my hand. The blood-pressure cuff
exposes all the broken glass that is my
heart –
decades of fear, rejection, and resentment,
the paper shredder that chopped my career
into confetti, how medicine failed me
after work crippled my hands,
and the Internet porn that refused me
a ride home from surgery no matter how I begged.
The surgeon’s solution to today’s
frustration –
even more doctor visits. Can’t
bluff my way through
anymore
What should I do with the shards of my heart?
Forge them to vases that break like before?
Nuke them to iron in the core of a star?
Grind them to sand so no edges remain?
Toss them in oceans that wash them to sea
glass.
They’ll pass for gems when seen from afar
Dangerous Vegetables
Spiteful as landmines
root vegetables lie in wait.
A carrot can blow off a man’s foot
while turnips pack enough C-4
to take out an M1 Abrams tank.
I’ve known of vegetables’ duplicity
ever since mom first served boiled spinach.
Creamed corn races motorcycles
without a helmet while artichokes
wrap piano wire around their stalks
to strangle unsuspecting victims.
Sweet potatoes fling lawn darts
on the playground. Onions
do back flips off the trampoline.
Bell peppers smoke in bed.
Squash leaves a space heater too close
to the curtains. Iceberg lettuce
sinks the Titanic.
Ferment cabbages with a little salt
and they annex the Sudetenland.
Watercress torpedoes merchant ships.
Daikon radishes yell “Banzai!”
only to have their suicide charge
met with habaneros’ flamethrowers.
Most insidious of all,
beets shoulder Kalashnikovs
while installing SS-4 missiles in
Cuba.
So, when the USDA recommends five servings
a day,
you’d better turn that food pyramid
upside-down.
Mustard greens, mustard gas
I don’t think so.
Packing a Life
My living room, a maze of moving boxes.
Inside - textbooks, lecture notes, college transcripts, Ph.D. thesis, blue-and-gold
doctoral hood, recommendations from dead professors, oscilloscope, Geiger
counter long out of calibration, wrist splints and 30% workers’ comp
disability, $300 test standard, plaque from a cancelled defence project,
security clearance review after I had too
much fun in Amsterdam,
Chef’s knives, pizza peel, stale Sichuan flower pepper, 3 old passports, canned clams that expired 5 years ago, coffee grinder, moka pot, photo albums, travel brochures, landline telephone, tent I slept in on the Olympic Peninsula, address of a woman named Zoe
4 bookshelves, 2 black belts, list of attendees from Boulder Aikido Summer Camp, VHS tapes of Tatsuo Shimabuku and George Ledyard, lifetime membership to Don Shapland’s Isshin Ryu Karate, wooden swords, torn hakama, gis that no longer fit, going-away card from my aikijujutsu teacher
Meditation bench, oryoki bowls, picture of me with a black eye taking the Buddhist precepts in 1985, inquiries about Buddhist groups in Texas, Dharma talks I gave, Zen center bylaws, my resignation as board president,
6 self-published novels, stories too controversial to read, record of every poem I submitted since 1997,
Sunk-cost fallacies of past glory
Jeff Cottrill’s Pink Blanket
sits on a green couch behind him like a
secret policeman waiting to report indiscretions to the ministry of state
security. It is, in fact, an alien balloon squid from the planet Landorian.
Disguised as stocking caps, mittens, and other knit goods, balloon squids have
infiltrated Toronto for decades. No one knows what they want but Serb director
Gavril Novgorod hinted at a plot to replace poutine with disco fries in his
unfinished film “The Cardigans of August” just days before his suspicious
death. Is it any wonder that Jeff Cottrill is the only Canadian to ever appear
at a Zoom poetry reading? I think not.
The missing ingredient in disco fries is cheese curd as if that could protect us from mind control – a mind control of Uzbek soft drinks, Dadaist engagement rings, and Venezuelan maple syrup. My local Wegmans only stocks queso fresco and paneer. Has the cynical plot infiltrated even here or does feeding cheese curds to flatulent cows provide the missing tritium to inflate the balloon squids so they can return to their planet of origin? In a weird reference to “Close Encounters,” a miniature Devil’s Tower made of French fries rises from Jeff’s kitchen table. What else is he going to do with them? Real Canadians don’t eat fries without cheese curd.
Tara Elliott’s Horseshoe Crabs
make lousy horseshoes. You have to attach
them with duct tape and they shatter into slippery goo after just one step.
Running shoes like ASICS would be a better choice but if you’ve ever taken a
horse to a shoe store, you know how awkward that can be. The clerk measures
each hoof on the foot plate, disappears into the storage room for what seems
like hours, and returns to say, “We don’t have your size in black. How about
oxblood?”
Being an herbivore, the horse freaks out at the mention of this colour so it’s off to another store. On the way out, the horse whinnies and nickers at two pair of Manolo Blahniks but they’re way out of my budget.
Great word play in these poems, thanks!
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