my power animal is a vcr.

please be kind.

i'm tired of flinching at door hinges,

of counting heads, of dreading the start of a car.

i can't lock every door

from both sides, or keep anyone's

feet from moving in the opposite direction.

still, i don't want to be a mine shaft

or a puppy or a single cent.

but i am a puppy;

and i will not let go

of your pant leg when you get up to leave.

old montgomery highway

i'm a two-dollar bill or

an american president between the years of 1877 and 1900.

i'm an 8-track, a vhs tape;

i'm a cheap technological metaphor.

you shouldn't feel how i feel, you should

retain your equilibrium,

you should find a field at the side of a road,

where the cars remain in sight

so you can still mock what you ran from.

and then when a car explodes on your field,

turns a third of it gray with ash,

you're allowed to mourn because you didn't realize then

what i, already living in hindsight, did:

it grew back greener.

and that's not a cheap technological metaphor, that

really happened.

i have an artichoke heart and an onion brain;

same thing layer after layer.

children don't like the taste of me,

and i don't blame them.

i'm in a vegetative state:

i don't have much in the way of roots,

and i've been demonstrating consistently low personal growth.

but i've been told consistency is everything.

you smell like cherry blossoms

and denatured alcohol.

but even that's intoxicating to me.

i've got no sense of self-preservation,

so your offer of formaldehyde was particularly romantic.

chlorine in the air or something

deadly or maybe

nothing at all

but the natural shortness of breath

that rides shotgun with fear

and i wish there weren't quite so many feathers

inside me or quite so much air around; i feel so claustrophobic and

i think it's unlikely to be chlorine but maybe

some internal element: feathers, lead paint

that once coated a toy i may have gnawed on as a child, broken glass,

the gold flakes in some high-end liquor i drank years back,

too much swallowed chewing gum, or maybe

nothing at all.

i wasn't going to say so,

but i don't feel too well.

beneath my window, a miserable tableau:

the orange cast of sodium light on melting snow,

frozen once but not in time,

intersecting black streets like a river of shame,

frozen only in time. and behind my window, worse:

me, a blank space surrounded by blank space,

quiet as a still-life.

but the window's pretty nice.