Well, I was at work the other day, and since I was so incredibly busy I spent the better part of a couple of minutes staring at my shoes. I finally announced to my coworker that my shoes look like catfish. (They do! I'm not even kidding!). Then I said I could probably write a poem about that. She dared me to. So, here it is, dedicated to her, and still, a little bit, in the works (In the actual format, the poem is one block stanza, not broken apart. I'm not sure why blogger can't understand these things...):
Doc Martens at the corner of Second and Second
~For M Rad
My shoes are two catfish skimming suburban
algae—pave dust, polyester~For M Rad
fibers too small for my eye to see—they gobble it up:
mud and birch mold, chewed-up gum
and a spilled latte. They drink it in with relish, slipping
from crack to crack or cobble to cobble
without missing a beat, hungry
for the next piece of wanton waste. And their eyes—dumb
oversized eyes wide open—staring straight up
at the blue or gray or fuchsia sweeping over,
never darting to safety when it rains, always eyes up
and open. They don’t need to search for purchase,
catfish, do they? Big sucker mouths and whiskers
like hands out telling them all they need to know,
never worried that they don’t dress up in anything
but silt-stitched grayscale scales zipped
across their back and sides. Their eyes on every sunrise, sunset,
every scroll of clouds unrolled across the water’s back.
If my eyes are down on them admiring their hunger
what do they know I’m missing
that’s going on over my head?
