Two Poems

BULLY PUPPET

Sometimes it was like this:
first a Hummer,
then two black town cars
and then three SUVs.
In the last, I saw
a wooden puppet waving
through a half-open window
so I waved too, shy
but friendly in that tentative
Midwestern kind of way,
happy to be noticed for once,
or so I thought. But then
tires screeched
to a halt and the back door
burst open.
Out jumped the puppet,
arm raised not waving,
and the puppet was screaming.
“Who told you to wave?
No one told you to wave back.”
I started to stutter,
but before I had a chance to go on
a man in sunglasses came up
from behind and handcuffed me,
pushing me toward the cars.
“Now just wait a minute,
Mr. Puppet. Mr. Puppet sir,”
I bleated as they stuffed me
into the Hummer.
“Shut up, lady,” Sunglasses said.
“You’ve got some major explaining to do.”

IN THE BIOPSY BARDO

I leave Dr. T’s office sporting a bandaged breast-
step into sunlight and yellow forsythia,
see, on the sidewalk, into strollers, babies smiling,

nannies, mothers, babies spitting and wailing.
Perhaps sooner than I imagined,
I will find myself plunked in a wheelie myself,

drooling and pooping: in the bardo,
say Tibetans, your idea of yourself as your former body
fades, as your future body takes shape.

My mole, my little brown house on the prairie,
once round and cozy, is now asymmetrical,
officially scary; sliced neatly and shipped to

Mount Sinai Pathology. None can save you now,
Captain Hook shouts to Wendy,
and I’m planning my funeral hymns, i.e.,

Rock My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham,
the stand-out selection of our fifth grade’s
American Hymns and Spirituals Unit;

at the word bosom, boys collapsed over their desks,
nervous and giggling, hands over their eyes.
My own bosom stings and smarts now:

ten days for lab results and, given my textual analysis
of Cat in the Hat, in which wayward sentients bowed,
with a hop and a smile, to the tap-dancing god of mayhem,

I am hardly surprised the people of Israel abandoned
themselves to the fervent worship of a golden animal,
when Moses failed to return immediately from the mountain.

Poor Moses: it was surely a wrench to find Bastet,
lion-queen of the cats, sashaying through camp,
yowling for sexual congress with her consort,

lapping goat milk, bell tinkling around her neck:
the bell of wakefulness, bell of delight in the present moment.
Subsequent exegesis got it wrong, by the way:

think golden cat, not calf-yes, if there’s a god
I think it might be a cat-elusive and unpredictable,
un-neutered of course, licking his paws; spraying at will.

Bardo: an in-between state.