I took a book of poetry to the grocery store with me today---Louise Glück's The Seven Ages. Just in case there was a poetry emergency.
Damn you nature documentary makers! I wept and writhed in my sheets all night, tortured by images I've seen in your films years ago. And Goddamn you, makers of steel traps! May you spend one thousand years reincarnated into animals caught in the works of your hands. When the earth is made new, may you then be forgiven. And please tell me, camera men, that after you got your horrific footage, you turned off your cameras and put those poor animals out of their misery, even if it meant beating them to death with your own gear. If you packed up and walked away, may you eat the bitter bread of seven-fold suffering and when the earth is made new, may you then be forgiven.
Saints Peter and Paul had a little tiff. I don't know the details but I'm pretty sure I would have been on Peter's side. Paul could be such an asshole sometimes.
I've drunk-dialed God hundreds of times. Mostly I just hang up when I get his machine (it pisses me off when he screens his calls). Other times I rage or sob hysterically, "You said you'd have mercy! You said you'd never forsake me! Give me my fucking Miles albums back!" More times than I care to admit I've shown up at his house, undignified, at 2:00 in the morning, hurling my dirty mary janes at his window, screaming, "I know you're up there with her! Be a goddamned man, come down here and face me!" I stuff my underwear in his mailbox and leave obtuse letters written in angry lipstick and nervous-breakdown eyeliner under his windshield wiper---Patti Smith lyrics, snippets of Plath poems. After all he's put me through, I still want him. How can I forget the time I was ravished with fever, delusional and frothing at the mouth? He came to my bed and put his bloody palm in my mouth. "Eat this," he said. I woke to a soft New Mexico dawn, put on some Grateful Dead in the kitchen. Feeling forgiving, and what the hell, it's almost Christmas I baked him some pumpkin muffins, left a message on his machine, asking if we could start over again.
