Musings

[Another B-side from the laptop hard drive. I think I wrote this about six years ago, and it's been collecting dust ever since. I'll never send poetry out for publication with my name on it, so I guess there's no harm in sharing this here.]

The Reluctant Wolfman

It begins in morning
with a pencil thin line
that hugs the curve of his jaw.
By afternoon it shades his cheeks
charcoal blush mark
scratchy gray in the hollows
He shaves in the men’s room,
scrapes smooth the bristles that
threaten there.

This a world of seeing after all.
The eyes on the streetcorner are ever open,
alert to the trick in the shell game.

(Recall 1960:
the white burn of t.v. cameras,
podiums wrapped in Old Glory.
Nixon and JFK square off in
fits of rhetoric and international matters.
Jack wins it on marquee looks alone--
swarthy, shifty Dick dismissed,
the telltale sign
his 5 o’clock shade.)

At dusk our man’s alone in the office,
frozen in fear
beneath desklamp halo.
Doubled-over and fixed on his image,
he sees the oblong reflection of monster
in his cigarette case.
His eyes are red, teeth gone yellow and sharp.
The jaw is transformed.
Fur tangles in the sweat beneath his shirt.
There’s a tautness in the musculature:
veins expanding in transformation, tendons
stretching in elemental change.

And what do you make of the lover’s kiss
with altered taste? The stranger’s face
in the morning mirror--

So he runs.
Targets home, imagines
the charge of the village behind him.
Torches and bloodlust in hot pursuit.
He bursts through the door,
chases the sleepy breath of love through
the house, up the stairs, in the room.
The startled shriek of waking wife at the touch.

With horror-flick certainty, it ends as you’d expect:
An embrace,
A murder.
The failure of love
in unexpected lycanthropy.
Another lonely villain
howling at the moon.