And if I don't write, I hurt people

More fun than therapy, cheaper than drugs.

If you want, Kristin, please. (Although to be completely accurate, I'm my own victim more often than not. But I count as people, right?)

But I count as people

Some people never get to that stage of realization, that not hurting people includes themselves.

For Chino

When we first saw her in the pet store, she was just past true kittenhood, six months old.

"Oooooh!" My daughter was enchanted. "She's all golden!"

She was, too. A cameo shade Persian, gleaming yellow cat with yellow eyes, a purr that could be heard rattling across a room. We brought her home with us.

Fourteen years later, she is skin and bone. Cancer has taken hold. She sleeps on the big soft pillow in our living room, deep into dying. I touch her a lot, trying to reassure, to ease her out. Sometimes, her purr rattles under my hand.

This one's for Capuccino, purest gold.

Aww, deb.

New poem, written in the "Written Right Now"contest at a local reading:

Light-Up Plastic Tiara

The apocalypse is a cable gameshow,
wears Vegas like a tiara,
smokes tobacco straight like scorched earth,
recycles in the late-night slots,
only the stoned will see it coming.

Aw, deb! You're not supposed to make me cry at work! Sniff.

ita, Liese, I loved both of yours. They make one stand back and go "whoa."

I'm particularly bereft of words for this topic. It might be because all I can think of is a pair of yellow shoes with black heels that I had in Spain. Loved those shoes. Never wore them in the states. They didn't fit.

still thinking, too.And "I work alone." to get all noir about it, so I could cry or strip or whatever, but otherwise Sail is me.

Yellow

Daffodils have no sense. The slightest hint of warmth and they push up through ivy, kudzu, unraked leaves, and the beer bottles and condoms on vacant lots. Sometimes they are the last visible sign of a house long gone. Kick at the dirt around a misplaced patch of daffodils and you may find a well, a foundation, a blackened hearth where some girl waited for daffodils and for spring. She shivered by the fire and dreamed of melting snow and tiny sprouts, the bright yellow of daffodils, the color of optimism, the shade of hope, the sign of unlikely survival.

Deb, so sweet and sad.

Thanks for the tag, Erika! I adore it. I may keep it for a long long time.

Victor, I like the new poem.