THE LAST POETRY MEETING

A poem for you on this warm July evening. I need to lay off the Duhamel because my stuff is just a beautiful shade of pale beside hers. Still. I write. And I mock writers and their habits while I'm at it. Take that, self!

THE LAST POETRY MEETING

Who is your inspiration

for carelessness,

for absolute carelessness?

The woman beside me says

it’s a toss-up between

John Milton

and Miley Cyrus.

The woman beside her says

she’s got this forty-year-old

nephew in Los Angeles.

I should have checked myself

before I said carelessness, to me,

is Ganesh, the Hindu god.

I don’t know why, in fact,

I know little about him

other than his elephant nose

and his fondness for sitting upon mice,

which reminds me

out loud

of my sister, who is

an endoscopic nurse

and has pulled the strangest things

from the strangest people’s

rectal cavities

though she’s never mentioned

mice, yet

and the woman beside me says

isn’t that sort of bigoted?

To think another person’s god

is the embodiment of carelessness?

I say yes, it probably is,

and she smiles

in a very unbigoted way

while the woman with

the nephew in Los Angeles says

she had a bigoted uncle once

but he died and no one

in her family felt obligated

to attend the funeral.

...