Tick
134 LISTEN HERE TICK from Meridian (2000) "Adults find hosts, suck blood, and mate. ... Mating usually takes place on the host beforefieding. " -from Ticks and What You Can Do About Them by Roger Drummond, Ph.D. Harpoon-lipped wicked French kisser, you near-do-nothing fattening at someone else's board. How come no heart beats all that blood, heat drop, balloon thirst, all lust? If our lives are wrought by curse, who thought up yours and for what crime? You do not ask not to be hated, but approach with galley-slave rowing motion to your stubble legs, your slowness not from indecision, not fear. You scale the biggest predator, risk a six-figure inflated desk-bound mammal same as the cur he's just kicked, and grip your beach ball bodied mate, a mangy hide bed as good to you as my white skin for fornication. You'd bite God! Not daunted by coagulant, not ashamed to hide your head in rusty rivers everyone shuns, you spit cement instead of fire, a neat eater for a glutton. Homely stigmata non grata, we are not spared the cruelty of mashing you with a brick edge, a letter file, or, with tweezers LISA COFFMAN 135 holding you to the thin match flare until you pop. You do not go easily, but ride the toilet's tipped flush, upright as a captain around and around, out of sight. A wasp dangles legs delicate as kite tails, the spider crochets circular doilies, why do we see in you nothing to admire, nothing of ourselves? Heat seeker, the places sweet to us are sweet to you: neck, waist, the feathery clefts of the crotch, taut soft hinges where you plunge, hang head down, succumb. ...
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