The Monkey Paw

on love and other things

And in a spitted sentence I claim it.

I took him for a working-class dinner. I ate fried cheese and potatoes dipped in hot oil. And next I suggested photography blurted out incorrectly in a two-hour period and kept my shoulders lenient. I've come to notice what it means to touch in the electronic palaver we've come to call dating. So it was done; a coat that couldn't keep warm anyway offered up like a gypsy: completely misunderstood, a history wiped off the slate and laughed at quietly, gold teeth making a perfect frame, and compromised. I could have liked you and I will not always look like this; I know I won't. That is, I think, a damn great smile you have.

I'm padding through this, numb-pawed, an idiot. I watched a special once about apes. One's mother died and so he perched himself on a tree above her quiet body and wept and shut his eyes and went to sleep and noticed the sun and the shadows and slept, did not eat or drink and died right there, unmoved, 10 feet above, went to sleep on and on. Right there. Dumb with love an animal just finished himself off right there.