Golden Spiral by Deb Plestid

With breakfast I read
The Essential Zen
carefully ordering the morning
marshaling good energies
admiring the brush painted circles
the kiwi fruit in yoghurt
the sunflower seeds in bread
the fuzzy bear slippers

but nothing is quite strong enough
to pull me back together
as the black cat
sits on the mule post staring
with yellow saucer eyes
satisfied, it seems, to see my aura
sagged and drooping
a voodoo mound of melted me
bound with threads of the boy’s night ramblings
pierced with his fear, his rage and the cough
that turned tight like a bark
precursor to jagged images that buzzed
in and out of my cold night’s dreaming

spiked and spinning
they shivered me worse than the cold