Bird House, Cat House, Down the Road a Piece

Even if the world is your oyster, you are probably not its pearl.

The creature who eats too fast pays out its orgasm like rope.

Always looking for something to say that never needs to be.

Spare key’s concealed in the bird house abandoned by birds.
Human house also known as cat house, its woman the keeper
against the winds, the ice, the black earth missing from seeds,
her man disobedient in the snake’s modus operandi, the apple
between his legs can’t flourish above its root in seasonal time
because, is it? there’s no help for him being a lover of women
and helpless because now his heart is ticking like any man’s,
or so his gay doctor informs him, his stethoscope amazing her.

Juan wants to fuck Judy Ewing. Cathleen wants him to herself.
If fucking is a kind of solution to love’s mysteries, its drunken
wonder, how you do it with your clothes on, then clothes off,
and no one stays the night but her, she can sleep through Hell’s
door banging shut under Abandon Hope, the drunkard’s alibi.
Judy Ewing gives what she must to Hubbard, her daddy now
Frank’s in Mexico; still in jail? Juan’s down the road a piece,
engorged with her image, all he knows the way she looked once.

Cathleen comes to the house in Lagunitas and knocks on her door.
She tries the key, dead bolt’s on, she goes around to the bathroom
window, climbs through it with alacrity, her body lashed, scarred
by her imagination: she’s blind and remembering Paradise Lost
reputed to have been dictated by Milton to whom? a secretary,
she knows, one foot bared by her sandal lost in the night’s dew.
He sleeps on the bed in the living room, where she takes a pillow
for herself; when he wakes he places it under her warm buttocks.

A spare key’s useless when the dead bolt slides into place. So:

The birds fled because the woman of the house mimicked flight.

The continuing invasion of cats also needed to be considered.

(2 July 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander