Craving

"Take your crippled sense of efficacy –
shove it where the moon shines blue,"
she thought she’d coo. She tends to misconstrue.

Words come to her like coughing comes to
pediatric nurses who suppress their
colds in baby clinics: finicky about repression,

she and they swoon in the constant sway
of navigating swooping loop-de-loops
that biplanes need altimeters they rarely have

to carry off with even slight finesse. Negotiating
stress is what it probably comes
down to: not unlike what one must do with

all the blueberries one seeks to smush into
one's altruistic jam pot: handfuls
of the sticky clumps of which, alas, may only

rarely hit the spot, but do provide alternatives
to watching naked women boxing.
Foxy switches in the nick of time! Amazing

how precisely one dissembles and finagles
both to foster and appease one's
fast and flapping craving for internal rhyme.


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