Hearing

Was I missing something? My very ear talked to me. Today it hurt me, then hurt me again, then screamed at me. It boiled with fury inside and I turned inward to consider it - what was this pain? At that exact moment, in public, my vision split and zig zagged into migraine. All at once I was a sea of sick pain. All random - nothing to do with cancer. Just something. Stress yes I submit that to the panel I know you know already and I know that you know that I know it so don't tell me.

So I'll read poetry:

The Room of My Life

BY ANNE SEXTON

Here,

in the room of my life

the objects keep changing.

Ashtrays to cry into,

the suffering brother of the wood walls,

the forty-eight keys of the typewriter

each an eyeball that is never shut,

the books, each a contestant in a beauty contest,   

the black chair, a dog coffin made of Naugahyde,   

the sockets on the wall

waiting like a cave of bees,

the gold rug

a conversation of heels and toes,

the fireplace

a knife waiting for someone to pick it up,

the sofa, exhausted with the exertion of a whore,   

the phone

two flowers taking root in its crotch,

the doors

opening and closing like sea clams,

the lights

poking at me,

lighting up both the soil and the laugh.

The windows,

the starving windows

that drive the trees like nails into my heart.   

Each day I feed the world out there

although birds explode

right and left.

I feed the world in here too,

offering the desk puppy biscuits.

However, nothing is just what it seems to be.   

My objects dream and wear new costumes,

compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands   

and the sea that bangs in my throat.

This next one I cut out and mailed to Jara year (years?) ago cuz we do that and today I got it back in the mail from her thank you 

Horse Piano

BY ANNA MCDONALD

The idea is to get a horse, a Central Park workhorse.
A horse who lives in a city, over in the hell part of Hell’s

   Kitchen, in a big metal tent.

 You have to get one who is dying.

 Maybe you get his last day on the job, his owner, his

    tourists.

 You get his walk back home at the end of the day,

some flies, some drool. You get his deathbed, maybe.

 And then, post mortem, still warm, you get the vet or else

    the butcher

 to take his three best legs. And then you get the taxidermist

    to stuff them

 heavy, with some alloy, steel, something.

 Next day you go over to Christie’s interiors sale and buy a

    baby-grand piano,

 shabby condition but tony provenance, let’s say it graced the

    entry hall

 of some or other Vanderbilt’s Gold Coast classic six.

 And you ask the welder you know to carefully replace the

    piano legs

with the horse legs, and you put the horse/piano somewhere
  like a lobby,
and you hire a guy to play it on the hour, so that everybody

    will know

 how much work it is to hold anything up in this world.
 

 Source of the text - The New Yorker, December 19 & 26, 2011

 

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