AN UNPOEM

Photo by S. Auberle

Today is one of those days when I just don't know where I'm going--in my life, I mean. You'd think by this age I'd know. Not so. Since I'm feeling clueless, it seemed right to go somewhere useful this morning. The dump fit that category. Packing up garbage can ground a person fairly quickly--did we really drink that much wine? On my return from that highlight, I stopped at the roadside market to buy a cider doughnut...a celebration of the season. Back home, I ate it, then took a big, fat, juicy, purple plum (breaking the way-too-many-adjectives-rule in the meantime), sat out in the swing and ate it too. Why does food always seem to be the antidote for disturbing questions of an existential nature? Bees circled enviously about me. Cicadas sang. The plum was too sweet. I tossed the pit, with flesh still clinging to it, out under the apple tree, where I waited for Luciano, my porcupine neighbor, to appear. Truth be told, it could be Lucia I was waiting for, but I really prefer not to get close enough to distinguish porcupine sex. At any rate, he or she must have been busily engaged in worthwhile work elsewhere, unlike myself, since no waddling little creature appeared. So I watched a grasshopper strolling past my foot. Tried to write a poem. Nothing happened. The grasshopper looked up at me, as if to say get with it, lady, winter's comin' soon. He was very annoying, with his gray-green body and red legs poised to leap on me at any second. He also had a vaguely disgusting looking wet sort of tail and kept touching things with it. I made him go away and then I stretched out in the sun and fell asleep. Still don't know where I'm going, but the grasshopper seems to.

~ mimi