What Not To Do

Thank you, Natalie Goldberg, for your advice (all those years ago) about focusing on the real (i.e. chosen) subject matter and not being distracted by the pesky side events (like a buzzing fly) that interfere with our clear perception and telling.

Thanks for advising us to include the buzz, but not to lose our focus; to include, but not to “marry” the fly.

For this week’s Writers’ Pantry at Poets And Storytellers United, I’m presenting the following (slightly revised) poem, originally published in the August 2003 issue of the (now defunct) online journal The Writer’s Hood.

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I’ve Married The Fly

I’m home, alone in the kitchen
heating and eating a burger
checking the blue flame
under the cast iron pan.
I’m watching the cheese melt
watching the marbled fat,
browned, sizzled into grease,
run down the side of the patty
like a lava flow off Mauna Loa,
infernal, inexorable, out
toward a flat black beach,
broiled from above and below.

I should be thinking of you
but instead I’ve married the fly.

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Poets And Storytellers United
Writers’ Pantry # 84
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