When I Look Outside My Window I Can’t Get No Peace of Mind
Demise might not happen today what do I see
a large woman walking with two canes a striation
of exhaust fluid pooling in a left-over rain puddle
from a downpour this morning that I watched
intently from my windowsill while eating a yogurt
Believe everything is actually working against you
because it is regardless of how much lipstick
you put on or whether or not the new deodorant
actually responds to stress as advertised which
by the way it does not but If it’s possible the mouth
might still be sexy after grease spurts out of a burrito
on the last bite we may be in the business of
a survivable universe or at least a tolerable one
which before it kills us makes us visible
• • •
Fat Dream with Blue Whale
We are gliding alongside each other in the North Atlantic ocean,
weightlessly propelling forward in the freezing water. I am as
immense as you are, reveling in the length and breadth of our imperfect
barnacled bodies, giant as we are graceful. It’s as if the entire sea is
a reverent procession for our massiveness. I am learning from you;
mimicking your precise dorsal fin inflections, following your dive
instinctively, plunging effortlessly into blacker, colder depths and then
swimming back up toward the light. I hear a slow, deep beat, as if from a
huge hollow drum, emanate from somewhere inside you—first a short one,
then a much longer one—a haunted bellow I can feel in my bones: you are
telling me we must breach before eating. Seamlessly we break the surface of
the water without much of a splash, two parallel slivers of moon ascending
from beneath. A rush of oxygen blasts our blood as we let air into our
lungs, filling us with the energy we need to lunge headlong and fast into
the swarm of glowing krill ahead of us. I watch you open your jaws to
nearly a 90° angle, and I tilt my head back to do the same. My mouth splits
itself open like a massive mollusk in preparation for the feed. I am
startled when instead of teeth I feel long curtains of rough baleen
attached to my jaw. We thrust into the luminous cloud of food, mouths agape,
sucking in every- thing we can fit inside us, gallons of seawater and billions
of krill swishing inside the cathedrals of our cheeks. Before I can allow
myself to swallow, I purge the excess ocean back out of my mouth with my
tongue, trapping only the desirable food in my baleen filter. There is such
implicit purpose in this ritual. We the collosals, our hearts so big a person
could swim through our arteries, thick walls of warm blubber padding the
enormity of our bodies. Nothing as large as we are has ever lived in this
world. The power of that immensity is an understanding between us, a quiet
knowledge that our size is our life force, and with it we rule these seas.