Small world

You know how I enjoy our little weekly get-togethers, and normally there would be some topic upon which I could expound for a couple of paragraphs. But this week, the only thing I want to do is light your hair on fire and suck on your foot. That’s right—it’s time to quit smoking—again. I probably shouldn’t whine about such things, but I find that the process requires of me a level of concentration similar to that needed to land the Space Shuttle on manual control.

I would talk about something other than my “mind-forged manacles” if I could, but I clank like the ghost of Marley beneath their weight, and all other considerations seem alike in universal unsatisfactoriness. (A neologism unsatisfactory in itself, I fear.) Instead, I will slip this poem out through the bars of the cage in which I now reside:

Zoo

It was a very small world
for a Kodiak bear—
a narrow sward of grass,
the same old logs to shred—
bringing to mind my own den,
this green rug worn down from pacing.