jitters

After I cleaned the litter box,
I watched a horror movie.

No.
It was unsettling and
surrealistic but not horrifying.
I know horror.
I’ve travelled north
along the Meadowlands
on a weekend eve,
locked the doors and didn’t breathe

(or grieve) as the traffic stampede,

pitiless, rejects Hague 1907,

death race Delaware to Ridgefield Park

After I cleaned the litter box,
I watched an
unsettling, surrealistic movie.
The only words spoken
were a weary
“Hello?”
to the rousing ring
of a red telephone

(I thought about the Batphone)

and
“The TV doesn’t work,”
one woman says to another
before feral mauling.

The director was up to something.
Twenty seconds of film
went to a tight close-up of
the mauler’s planetary eyes,
malachite and merciless.

I asked,
“What is this guy trying to do?”
When I seek understanding,
I step to my balcony and
I talk to the railing
that protects me
from a two-story drop.

I knew the mauler.
She held a thin resemblance
to a girl who overpowered me

(I had dreamt she was
a Sicilian vampiress)

and now I asked the railing,
“What am I trying to do?”

with some quaint measurement
of fear, yes. followed, stronger,
by light-headed whimsicality
interlaced with searing thunderstrike:

yes, my cherubs,
my wee ones,
my scampering goblins
of pluck and play,
all the dead and buried,
without exception,
shall rise from interment
and predicate all obsequies

to Pinterest gothic curtains
and gorgeous crockpots.

my chortle vibrates the railing;
I can do insane and glee
like a child plays hopscotch.
this has been the hand on my shoulder
since the egg hatched into the
pot of boiling baptism.

I returned to my movie,
to my role: lust and savagery,
audience of one, table for one.

the mauler smiles.
I bare my chest.

the screws on the railing
turn counterclockwise
forty-five degrees.