[Bobcats]
©2004 Alix Olson.

This world provides the poetry.
We just assemble its arrival,
us bobcat mutt girls intent on unravelling
our impatient prognoses travelling us town to town.
And my hair sort of looks like a lion's and your mouth is shaped like a roar
and we have never been invested in the state of unruly,
I guess it's that tameness has always seemed boring to us.
But, we are in a mean armwrestling match with our passion,
our elbows slipping off the table as she's cradling our palms.
She looks us square in the face, says this is not about brute strength, girls,
this is just about holding on.
So, we are holding on, you and me, we are flying past the past lives of pastures
where walmarts now sit, autocrats snuffing out fields of breath
and stuffing them dull with steel rows of plastic shit.
And even the highways are adopted these days,
and we have been adopted by them.
We are road-weary sophisticates, we are truck-stop debutantes,
we are bobcat mutt girls.
We got an atlas as a lover in her backless attire, we got a gas-guzzler chauffeur,
and she is steering us spent towards our next check-in desk,
she is ducking her head just barely clearing,
you open sleepy eyes, tell me that's how you're feeling.
So, here we are again. Another round of tacky pictures of boats and lamps shedding thin,
paper-shrouded soaps and floral-bound beds itching our skin.
Yes, here we are again, spewing paroxyms at another motel television,
at the commander-in-chief of collateral damage,
at the bodies buried beneath this perverse double-speak.
Yes, here we are again, awaking to another today of the USA, shoved underneath our motel door.
And the air conditioner gasps, as the past masks incognito as the present on that front page.
She's in a police protection program, she's afraid to be seen,
she knows too much about the bombings, it's her recurrent bad dream.
And it's an epidemic now, this moral amnesia, a good people coming down with a bad case of evil.
And sometimes this violence breaks us, baby,
we go scattering like pool balls after each direct hit,
blame scrambling frantically towards one another's pockets.
But we are in a meaner arm-wrestling match with this country, our elbows slipping off the table as she's cradling our palms.
She looks us square in the face, says this is just about blind faith girls, this is just about signing on.
But we are not signing on, you and me,
so we forfeit, stamp our biceps proudly anti-patriotic,
see we reject the premise of your entire border concept.
And we are moving onward, America, here is to another town well-spent.
And here's to inspiring the counter-clockwise uprising of two bobcat mutt girls.
And how they chose to live.