You Don’t Need A Pet

First of all, I would not have known
the Being if you’d told me its name.
I would have been oblivious to it.
I would have gone on my way
kissing gnats, worshipping spiders;
in general paying more care and attention
to the creepy-crawlies than to you and your
stories of how you’d fought it and then
befriended it and brought it home
with you, where it stayed in the basement
and peed and pooped in a box while
only now and then asking to go upstairs
and look out the picture window
and yearn for the world, that place
it had left behind to humor you; that is what
an angel does, correct? I have the name
now, at last: angel or demon, secondary only to
God or the Devil (or both on some days).
Either way, it’s a creepy-crawlie; it’s secondary
to its master, it lies awake at night after
cuddling up to you all day and plotting
its revenge upon you all through the night
for taking it home to your home and feeding it
your food and drink; it wonders now and then
about how you’ll take it once it smites you
once it does, if it ever does. Meanwhile
you think of it as soft, cuddly, though
it looks like a gator with huge wings
and those red eyes, the pairs of them;
the multiples pairs of them. Angel or demon,
it doesn’t matter; I’m staying far away
from whatever it is. I’m the rational sort.
My otherworldly beings are all in my head
where they belong, where they torture me
when I can stand it, when there’s no room
for the lot of them to crowd into the space,
such as it is, that is left.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`
onward,
T