Sunday, March 9, 2008

Last Night


Last night I watched a program on the History Channel
which, between commercials for the quick delivery of pizza
and a lizard selling car insurance, spread the infancy
and adolescence and adulthood of our Earth out like a rug:
patterns of geology which indicated we’d been ice-bound
and incinerated and had gained and lost more species in
the past gazillion years than we have got right now. In the midst

of this, a craving grew in me like lava in the crust of poor
Pangaea which had just begun to separate into the continents –
and while that fire began to eat the edges of a crumbling world,
my craving turned into a grumbling lust for something sweet,
and so I padded out to make some chocolate milk. Now, I don’t
think I’ve had a glass of that since I was ten, but Lord knows
suddenly I had to have it then. I filled a big one up with liquid

from a fat-free cow and squiggled in kapows of Hershey’s syrup
(squeeze container – oddly sensual), then poured a packet
I still had of Splenda (got it for a friend who liked it – whom I’d
had a crush on several years ago: that was quite a rout – never
threw it out) – clicked a spoon against the glass into the mix
and watched it turn the right homogeneous bewitched and longed-for
cast of palatable brown. Then I swigged the whole thing down.

And, oh my, was it good. By the time I settled back in bed to see
what new catastrophe had yet again beset my globe, my
chocolate-milked gestalt had roved – loosed itself like goosedown,
fluffed away by all the winds of asteroids and unrequited loves
and other cosmic sins – and I was back where nothing loses,
nothing wins, and treats that tasted good when you were
ten miraculously tasted good again. No beginning and no end.



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