ManicDDaily

DVerse Poets Pub has a “Meet the Bar” challenge, hosted by the wonderful poet Samuel Peralta, to write like a Martian; i.e. to look at one’s subject from an alien, or at least, different, perspective.  Here’s mine:

Glue Trap

The lie of a long-term love
is like a mouse
caught in a glue trap. Even as
you don’t want to find it, you
want to find it–you have heard
its gnaw in the kitchen, behind
the bed, inside the baseboards,
for some time.  Yet
once you catch a trace of its
stuck self–through a sidelong glance, a blur
of grey matting the glue–you
stand upon a chair, avert
your stare, splay legs,
hold arms akimbo, assume any
awkward stretch to reach
the cupboard, dish rack,
fridge, and avoid
dealing with it, until,
trying to swallow the tea that you’ve
just made from your frail perch, you gag
upon the taste of fur in your
throat, like the taste
of your own dark hair,
greying.  

Torn now by the
squirm that flays even
as it makes its play
for escape, you bend down–
propping with some long-necked
implement and heavy mitts–
and drown that distended pulse,
at which point (as tiny dabs
of air and whatnot
surface), you realize,
mourning, that what’s died
was not like words at all. 

PS – for something totally alien to the above, i.e. FUN, please please please check out my comic novel NOSE DIVE, a steal on Kindle for just 99 cents.  (Slightly more but still a bargain in paperback.)