Of the Painted Mouth

When they came home early:

There was no barking from the house.
Inside, the old dog was lying down,
the weight of missing on his snout.

The vanity mirror would not shut up:
it told them that her skirt muttered
little circles on the floor when she fell,
and that she sat there for several minutes,
bemused, dots warring against gridded tile.

And the living room was full of envelopes,
inflated, ballooning at the joints and seams,
courtesy of the housesitter's daughter
who had kissed them all alive.

On Maslow's Hierarchy

A poem written for me...?

My pyramid is two stories high
An excellent coffin
Don't care about nothin'
Just give it a try.

cat doll

first, they said it was his teeth
so we stitched his mouth shut
and cut him a new one and
the white stuffing fell out in clumps
like

when they said it was his heart
that it ticked too much
was broken by itself, for once, not
someone else, and i envied him,
as i stuffed his ears with foam
and it dribbled down his acute cheeks
and he shed hair for days
but

they were wrong both times,
the problem with the cat doll was that
it was bad from the inside, rotten,
we'd always called him rotten,
because of mischief, and never known
it was the right diagnosis.