Frankenstein.

On Thursday night, around 7:30pm, while I was wrapping myself in a damp white towel at the Y, I bumped into Steve and my fellow blogger the Flaming Curmudgeon. We hadn't seen each other for a couple of weeks. I mentioned that I had been working out at the Y in Connecticut.

The Curmudgeon smiled and blinked and observed in his usual penetrating fashion that I had not posted anything new on my blog in a few days, inquiring rather archly--where was I?

I fondled my soap bottle. I thought about saying, "I was discussing poetry in Connecticut...," but the Curmudgeon would have instantly impaled me on a spiky and skeptical glance. So, I studied my feet in shame.

I really could offer no defense for my absence, but a guilty pink hush.

...

Still, I was discussing poetry, at least part of the time, the intimate subject of which is never all that far from my lips.

Part of that discussion has led me to reconsider a piece I wrote a couple of years ago and abandoned to cryogenic suspension in a old manila folder in the basement.

I preserve these things in the hope that someday I will discover something new, something that my Hunchback and I hadn't noticed before, some idea that, with the assistance of electricity--lightning--poetic technology--will allow us to resuscitate what is, for purposes of this discussion, a corpse.

Or, at least, rip out the cancerous old lungs of our compliant patient and replace them with a pair of lovely new elastic ones. Preferably those of a long distance runner--since we might need this pair to huff and puff their hearts to pieces for at least few millennia.

I know this all sounds kind of gross--offensively forensic. Somebody is always suffering for the sake of something, I am afraid. Most often, in the case of this Blog, it is the reader.
...

Anyway, in that frosty folder I discovered the following. It is written in a style as close to free verse as I seem to be able to manage without breaking out into hives.

Bleach Spots


When I was sure you were asleep

I slid out of bed.
I tip-toed to the kitchen for a top
secret rendezvous with a wedge
of pumpkin pie.

As I slipped into the fridge,
in the light, I couldn’t help noticing a line of
stains adorning that soft, blue tee
I wear when I’m chilly.

I counted nine pastel blotches
along the cuff of my right sleeve—nine luminous dots
the powdery pallor of Tang
(the Astronaut’s drink).

And, moving the milk, I thought,
“That big orange blotch is the color—
the exact mixture of citrus and sky
I had been searching for

all night.”