Two Poems

Cyst with Teeth

My system’s twisted attempt at offspring.
My feminine offering gargled and brooding
in the ovary, pushing the pain neurons
and pressing hard against the bladder.
Purposeless stone with my worst features.
Smiling up at me from the sonogram
with the same gapped teeth I was born
with, the ones my mother used student loans
to close, after I cried about how goofy
I wore happiness. Metal bar across
my dental, pulling me into line, into a more
acceptable and subtle display of joy; neither
my first nor last self-inflicted violence of vanity.
My prized lump, my eldest-born,
what wouldn’t I do for it? Love it or try
desperately to fix it, the same difference.
A handful of mama’s chestnut hair growing
from the top and sides of its cell mass.
So ugly and useless even the pro-lifers
fall silent as the scalpel cuts slices in.
Benignly abnormal like an innocent
monster. Ecoptic cluster of my negative
energy, my failed domesticity, throbbing
and aching on the operating table:
those haunting chompers chattering,
mocking me or trying to form their first word.

***

Tessellation of an Obsessive Compulsive

The washing machine runs
and re-runs
the mile-long track of afternoon
until the clothes are cleaned
of all bad thoughts they carry
in their polyester-threaded parasomnias.

Piles of fabric create a cotton-woven
noose of superstition and indecision,
under a strangulated window
reflecting a world

full of chaos-coded, willy-nilly,
random catastrophes. Hold your breath
as the ambulance passes.

How long should you think about something
to make sure it never happens?

Nature is patterns. The stripes around
the tiger’s eye, honeycomb tessellations, sheep horns
and coastlines. Down to the atom’s arrangement—
you dare say not everything matters?

One more faucet tap,
one more light switch flicker,
one more rinse or repetition,
flex or shift or pace or
placement
might save us.

You cannot prove it cannot
and the brain sweats
and the washer runs
endlessly to cleanse us
of every reasonably /
or unreasonably feasible tragedy
upon / or potentially upon us.