Would love to plan some meets. Traverse City/Cadillac/Charlevoix area.

Skunk

If only I could awaken as a skunk,
broad fore-claws throwing off the bedding,
sending the alarm clock to shatter on the floor
shredding the morning paper-
I’d prance outside,
fluff up my tail
ready to piss my dissent
over the world
laughing with the churring language of skunks
as I watched people run and scatter,
thinking:
I don’t stink, you do!
I’d get along
by not getting along,
some sulfury Mephistopheles
no worse than an oil refinery
or a paper mill
or your own exhaust fumes belched out endlessly
until the sky shows a sickly yellow-
I’d face life
with the full force of my tail
lifted in opposition
to this world.

Anteater/Antbear

Striding on curved fore-claws
across the Mato Grosso
you stop
almost casually
to slip
a long tongue
down this or that hill:
Antbear, what’s it like to go through life with no teeth?
Sucking it up
as the ranchers
hunt you down
& drive you out to raise cattle,
the drone of tractors and engines like foreign insects,
as the dust kicked up by hooves
blows across the denuded brush.

All you ever sought were ants-who wants ants?

You lap up your fill
of workers and drones
but never kill the queen
the colony,
the infinite underground cities,
that supporting substrata---
but there’s fewer of you now
cutting the grasslands with your stiff broom tails,
and alone now
wandering and distant
you scent the master’s boy
with his feeble binoculars
& the gun his dad gave him, his first,
& as he stalks along squinting into the early AM sun
you rise up above him,
knock him to the ground,
your claws swiping at his soft face like scissors,
& you leave him there,
collapsed,
bleeding,
the carcass picked over by buzzards-
covered now
with a gentle blanket of ants.

-© Simo-Skunk, 2014

30,000 Miles, One Way (Groundhogs)

I’ve come to expect less:
the accidents
cleared to the shoulder,
the twisted masses of steel and plastic,
the flashing lights.
sirens,
the bodies carried off on stretchers
in the next lane over:
the line of brake-lights slowing,
tiny corpuscles
stretching into the distance of this clogged artery
where deer lay folded,
as if asleep,
their blood ticked across windshields,
or ground into the pavement like bruises,
the bright orange of fox fur
sending a sharp scent of decay
upwards to circling birds.

The groundhogs
watch from the sides of the parkway,
nibbling tender shoots,
as if laboring against this all
content merely to fatten themselves for their long sleep.

If I could stop
for one moment,
I would become them.

But instead
the need
the hunger
that is always there
pushes me up and down this same grey strip of pavement
in this tiny metal box,
bald tires,
the side mirror knocked off by the plow,
the engine misfiring,
a tiny vessel,
a clot waiting to gum up the works.

-© Simo-Skunk, 2014

Owl

They don’t see you
sitting perched
on the branch,
eyes still as mirrors
until it’s too late
and your thick body
swoops down
through the tangled branches,
navigating that leafy maze
without sound,
the squirrel struggling in your talons
born aloft to his death.

We don’t see the oncoming headlights swerving over the double yellow lines
the figure in the dark
the one drink too many
the tumor before it forms
the flood before it flashes
the life running out from us.

The owl knows.

He waits for you
at night
as you toss
sweating
in dreams
where teeth crumble like chalk,
your vision dims to nothing
and none of the lights work.


Unable to see
or run
through the thicket of briars
piercing your legs
the ground gives way
to nothing
& you plunge
into the river
rising & snapping trees along its bank like match-sticks
as the rapids pull you under
to drown
in the covers
of the bed
where you will someday die,
caught in the talons
that have always clenched you tightly in their grip.

It is already too late.


-© Simo-Skunk, 2014

Dedicated to Anne Sexton.