12-05-2018, 11:35 PM
Stockholm Cockroach
Spent some time last night
with a cockroach in the bathroom,
didn’t have a shoe to crush it
or a hammer (was a big one,
brown and glossy, looking poisoned
one antenna loose and shorter).
It just circled, that lamed feeler
failing to keep contact,
crawled disjointedly, self-cornered
but deterring me for fear
he’d run right up my naked leg.
He’d react to any blow
of my puffing air, not weapon–
sometimes cringing back in terror,
others limping hopelessly
toward his distant, mountainous
tormenter with the galling breath.
In the end I rose, relieved,
and rather than seek shoe or hammer
hazed him out into a hallway
then beneath a closet door
which I left unopened, oddly
grateful he’d escaped alive.
Spent some time last night
with a cockroach in the bathroom,
didn’t have a shoe to crush it
or a hammer (was a big one,
brown and glossy, looking poisoned
one antenna loose and shorter).
It just circled, that lamed feeler
failing to keep contact,
crawled disjointedly, self-cornered
but deterring me for fear
he’d run right up my naked leg.
He’d react to any blow
of my puffing air, not weapon–
sometimes cringing back in terror,
others limping hopelessly
toward his distant, mountainous
tormenter with the galling breath.
In the end I rose, relieved,
and rather than seek shoe or hammer
hazed him out into a hallway
then beneath a closet door
which I left unopened, oddly
grateful he’d escaped alive.
Non-practicing atheist