Poem for Friday

Crime
By Jason Shinder

Look another way
    and Mrs. Dreyfuss's dress is rising.
        She stops me in front of the Cheerios.

How's school? How's sister? How's Mom?
    I'm almost ready to confess
        everything: My mother is terrible.

She makes beds and breakfast and sits
    all day watching TV, drinking diet soda:
        the soda turns paler,

finally she falls asleep.
    She hates shopping,
        her dead husband, her crooked son.

But I smile, say Mom's fine, running
    for mayor, while the beer cans
        I've stuffed under my green army jacket

rub up against my nipples,
    which are growing breasts of their own,
        large and beautiful as Mrs. Dreyfuss's.

I hope Mr. Dreyfuss did not see I was looking at them,
    my eyes moving down the buttons of her blouse.
        The trouble with me is I don't know

if I can love a woman. More than anything
    I fear Mrs. Dreyfuss's lips
        opening up to touch mine.

How will I ever kiss a woman without ever really knowing
    if it is a kiss? I dream I circle lazily
        around the head of Mrs. Dreyfuss,

touching her hair. Although the aisles are beautiful
    with candy and fruit and I love staring at them
        for theirs is a beauty of the world

not human, I am not thinking about them. I am
    thinking about love. Even the reflection
        of my face on the shiny glass

of the tall refrigerator of beer is beginning
    to tell me about it: Do not confess everything:
        It is necessary to deny

to go on.

--------

Between the time when I got up in the morning to buy my Superpoke penguin Mount Rushmore, solve the Washington Post sudoku and read about how people are raising chickens in their backyards because it's the best way to get organic eggs and fertilizer, and the time when Jon Stewart declared his frustration about the firing of gay military translators because waterboarding may make a prisoner talk but it can't make him talk English, I did very little worth reporting -- read some Amy Tan, watched a Next Gen episode to review, did a survey on peer pressure with Adam for his health class in which I was asked for my most embarrassing memory of middle school...does one tell one's pre-teen son that it was getting one's period in the middle of English class and staining one's skirt so that he understands that it's difficult to be a girl, or does one omit those facts until he's older?


The peacock at Frying Pan Farm was not in the mood for showing off his feathers the weekend before last, perhaps because there were no females around.


I don't suppose there's anything the alpacas can do about the fur in their eyes.


Quadruplet lambs surrounded their mother, who was bleating unhappily at having been shorn.


A pile of piggies -- the children of Spot sow Ginny -- huddled together in the barn while their mother was in the hot sun.


Despite the heat, I think their mother might have been relieved to get a break from nursing.


Nor the chickens about their feathers, though that didn't seem to make them stop laying.


Horses were happily munching in a field of grass and daffodils.


This dog was resting in the stable, and seemed very happy to get a bit of attention.

Oh, and I watched the Smallville season finale, which someone who 1) is smarter or 2) has been paying better attention will have to explain to me. (I know I was not paying proper attention this evening because Dementordelta pointed out that a character had actually remarked upon the sexual tension between Clark and Oliver and I did not notice...oh fine, the character actually merely said "tension," but we all know what they meant.) However, it did confirm a couple of things that have been niggling at me.

Spoilers: The most obvious one is that Clark's head-up-his-ass routine is both annoying and unattractive, far less so than action-Ollie taking responsibility for killing Lex and trying to kill Doomsday. He abandons Chloe at a moment when everything in her life has fallen apart? He doesn't deserve her, and he does deserve whatever badness is coming (what was that symbol at the end -- Doomsday? Kandor? Zod?).

Though speaking of Chloe, when did she lose the ability to heal people...did that go away when Brainiac's powers left her? How come she couldn't heal Jimmy the way she healed Lois? And speaking of Doomsday...I'm sorry, he's just not scary enough as a supervillain. Davis is repulsive and revolting and creepy, I won't miss him at all, but Doomsday just stomps around and tosses cars like Godzilla and doesn't do anything to justify Tess believing he's a deadly threat to the planet.

At least Jimmy gets to deserve Chloe, finally, before he dies, even though he comes out with the line, "It's like you're some kind of super...guy" (Daniel: "Fail"), which seals his fate since he now knows Clark's secret. "You are as much a hero as him," Jimmy tells Chloe, apparently over his resentments and addictions, though it's odd that he never introduced his wife to anyone in his family and his own little brother didn't know who she was. So yeah, another season gone, and I don't know if anyone can tell me about anything because my flist tonight is all SPN. I admit I watched the season recap, but that was because of "Carry On Wayward Son."