The Tao of adhesion and slip
Cat the dog (nickname stuck) comes in from the rain, shakes vigorously, water flies off fur all over me and the closed in porch…
The musculature of a horse quivers underneath hide like a seizure, shaking off flies trying to bite…water slides off duck’s back, no effort on duck’s part…snails leave trails of slime protecting them from sticky dirt, lubricating their peregrinations…I splatter a mosquito, flick tiny corpse off my arm with a single finger…carrion drops off vulture’s naked head.
Yet some things stick tighter than Velcro (r), burrs on a coat, leeches on a frog, napalm on screaming civilians,
like a guy whose mother tried to kill him twice when he was little; grownup now he feels repulsive, unworthy of love, no way to shake that off…yet…we keep on trying, stick to it.
Bigotry maggots cling to the gray slick folds of a brain, burrow in rapaciously, replace neurons with slimy perverted connections.
Love can slide right off the wounded like lube off a condom; lies and poisons mimic love having no trouble at all sticking to a soul,
truth slides off the corrugation of some minds, rain on a hot oiled tin roof,
some people are slippery, others stick to you, others come and go, detachment can be a painful bitch with Band-Aids (r), speaking of wounds…rrrripppp!
Sometimes words slide right out of a poet’s oral aperture, other times they stick in the craw creating silent redundancies, or hypersyllabic utterances difficult to articulate,
sometimes they cling to multiple meanings; other times they queue up waiting like good little doobies knowing their time will never come.
Time to let go.
~ Wry Welwood
28th of July 2021
At home in my jury-rigged long-distance therapist’s office, I struggled to wrap my mind and heart around some desolate self-negation I had just heard. Sometimes it takes me a while to breath again after looking into the void. I heard our dog barking and went to let her in from the rain. The ease with which she threw off the water made me wish the man I had just spoken with could shake off the horrible lies foisted upon him since childhood, just that easily. That got me wondering: why are some truths so hard to hold on to while some lies stick to our souls like mucilage? The opposite is often true also, of course, but I wasn’t in a Pollyanna mood just then.That is a different poem.
Written in response to J.D. Harms’ 28th of July 2021 prompt: a titular experience.
Thank you to Viraji Ogodapola.