Priming the creative pump at night, writing in my IPad, random thoughts on various topics. You know, just letting the mind roam free. Hoping the Muse can come to the rescue.
Bitten
I had the Bug Guy come to the apartment, lift up the mattress, look behind the headboard to see if there were any bedbugs. He didn’t ask to see the bites on the backs of my thighs, thank God. Those little round bumps that stayed hard and red for a week or more, quieting down during the day, then itching like hell at night, if I dared touch them. They could be spider bites, he says. There’s a couple of dead ones on the floor in the corner of the room. I can’t imagine spiders in my bed, slithering under the covers, to take pleasure in leaving their mark on my delicate flesh. Mosquitos? he proffers. I haven’t seen one in months and I’d definitely have noticed. Nothing here, that I can see, he says. I pull everything out behind the bed and vacuum any remnants of spider. He returns a week later with some kind of deadly spray strapped to his body, eager to take out any lingering bugs. I consider the poison filling my room, send him away.
Sweet
There was no walking, I should say intentional, walking today, unless you count home-to-car-to-office-to-car-to-home. I have pride when I exercise which gives me license to eat without guilt and shouldn’t that mean I could use a course of OA meetings. I believe in sweets as a remedy for a lot life’s pains, though, again I have my limits. My particular sweets don’t coincide with my husband’s, nor my cousin, who can’t have any kinds, because she screams down a long slide into a place she doesn’t want to go if she imbibes anything with an “ose” on the label. I’m judicious, or think I am, about it, have evolved from white sugar to brown to honey to agave to coconut sugar, which is my current. Don’t give me those Keto options or those pink packets of chemicals masquerading as sugar. It’s just not real and, like a poem, it’s got to taste sweet on the tongue and, perhaps even, uplift my sour spirit, in a sometimes hard and perplexing world.
Hockey?
I don’t understand hockey. I don’t understand icing, don’t get what an offside is, kinda get the face-off and hooking with stick—like a horse collar tackle in football. You can get sent to the box for that kind of move. How they skate like demons across that rink, do that slam thing into the boards, face smushed up against the plexiglass, teeth get tossed out onto the ice, brawls a regular feature of the contest. I’ve only seen them on TV, like I’ve only witnessed a tennis match, water polo, ski jumping. My love is baseball where the pitcher can get a blister and it keeps him on the injured list for weeks and sliding into the catcher, cleats up at home, is no longer allowed.
Hari B Poet 