mmmdcccviii

Paws to Prey

we pause to pray. the
entire world holy. like
sex with our socks on 

we wholly pause. a 

wooly habit (the nun 

was itchy, i itch! the nun 

said itchily). holy. the whole
room, a bedroom, their
studio, a micro-apart
ment, pawsed. we’ll
pause when we feel like
it, we all said. then our
home took off, the pads
of its paws pounding the
pavement for several par
secs. the red socks, a
set, had bed sects with
the human individual
who’d been most deli
berately chosen to del
iver the pizza. that deliv
erer certainly is a liver!
a life-filtered lifter of
lots of pizza. pizza that,
when delivered, gets tips
with no bills, mostly by
tops, gets topped as a
tip, the pizza deliverer,
who, fresh from the doc
tor, was just diagnosed
with cirrhosis of (guess
what?) the liver. what
a life that deliverer had
had, a has-been not ex
pected to last much long
er. longingly, the room,
living the livelong life of
a micro-apartment, thirst
ily pauses at a dog bowl that

is only somewhat moist. the
bowl without water has con
tents that soon get slathered
on dog-tongue, get tongued
by a studio whose inhabitant
is primate, no longer 54. that
makes 55 says the googly-
eyed go-go dancer who’ll
soon get paid to dance on
the laps of pricks; on the
pricks in some laps. he
also slam-dances a conga
in tonga with some regular
ity. a tall narrow drum
that is splayed on the
floor is slapped with
some hands. this is
how the go-go dances.
with his hands he did
dance. and he does,
only now and then
donning a brief pair
of aquamarine-col
ored underpants.
boy, does he dance
as the studio bounces
both this way and that.
and other ways, too.
for it has found you
(who might just be
me), who, of him,
is quite fond. but
let’s make this more
of a mystery, shall we,
for the sake of pretend
anonymity? our home
that now so swiftly pedals
its way toward something 

that no one is sure of might 

once have been a tiny 

apartment. and
what might a small
apartment want,
what might goad one
in any particular direction?
picture frames and perhaps
a refrigerator. but when the
coffin-sized home is the pad
of yours truly? once it arrives
at wherever it’s going, it throws
up a top-tipped dancer from tonga
it had swallowed with only a couple
of chomps, ‘chomp-chomp’ and the
dancer was gone until he was vomited
from home. he was gone, he was
home, he is home when he’s gone,
he was spewed from our home
and we look at that once-
swallowed dancer from tonga
for days (while we’re dancing
the conga, of course). but that
poor, wretched liver that wretched
deliverer of pizza, now finds himself
lost and quite homeless yet tipped
to extremes and then topped ex
tremely by the tips of the pricks
of some lovers of pizza. the dancer,
he felt that he could not have feelings,
the pizza deliverer felt unfelt. which
was all quite suspicious considering
the evening’s odd sequence of sick

events. and the sycophants were
witness, they felt this guy’s radical
metamorphosis, from considerate
courier of circular meals to
motional gogo, dancer of conga,
to tippled taker of tops for tips
by such pricks, to becoming a
twice-chomped meal for a
home until, finally, resuscitation
by regurgitation, getting a life
that had mostly been taken
but this time without life’s
most significant sensation,
that characteristic which
we call feelings were now
missing. and spectacularly,
for he had been eaten, you
see, by the home of yours
truly. and, oh, what a mini
scule house this one is.
gestation’s a bitch, it could
be said, is this story’s
amoral moral. but,
really, who’d say it?
and why and to whom?
why, the answer’s yours
truly, by all means, of
course! who’ll, so as to
have this historical house-
spinning one-storied yarn
best savored, will save
the rest of it for later, if
you catch my drift. do
you know what i mean?