A Dixie-cup of Stew

Stir the pot in order to extract
from your dear savory illusion
of hegemony some sense that
you have got a hand in how
the stew will bubble up and out:

all the spices you must call on
are, however, inner, which suggests
you can’t pretend you know
precisely what you’ll have for
dinner; even though it’s cooking

in the most familiar hearth, and –
at least as far as you can tell –
extrapolates itself from nothing
but your own organic parts.
You’re in the kitchen of your heart;

the dining room’s your head:
your pantry is your pancreas;
but every time you shop it’s for
the same ingredients you would
have had had you decided not

to shop instead. Every day you
sit here in the city lights and
contemplate familiar sights:
upholstered bed and wood and glass
and brass kadiddly-doos from

which you daily choose to see,
appraise and raise another
vibrant spread: you’re in the market
for a magic carpet on which you
might shed constraints and fly

into another private sky – pack
a dixie-cup of stew and on a woven
wing discover somewhere new
to find to land and eat and sing.
Or you take a nap. Kindred thing.


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