the zoo

 
He was sitting on an unmade bed
    Body bare
My skin tightened around my bones at the sight
  Until my flesh shook
Shook itself right off my bones
Caught by the skin-bag
Something like
    “Don’t worry, it’s just a
metaphor”
Kissing exactly the same as I remember
   Although
His voice, I don’t recall –
      But then again I have never had ears

 Or what ears I did have
  First apprehensive
  Soon drank his speech
They would have willingly drowned
      had I let them
We kept holding on
He said he’d be back. When he left I
  noticed that on the bed
  hiding in the sheets there was
a cat and a
  rat. The

rat crawled up the side of the bed and into my hair.
I couldn’t get it out.
I kept calm.
 “Stay calm,” said the cat, “it’ll
       be
          all
             right.”
I was keeping calm because I knew that was the proper way to deal with the situation.

The cat
climbed onto my back
to get at the rat
the rat in my hair
  They hissed and fought over the
back of my
head.
I put a hand up to reach them
Pulled them off, they
climbed back up again.
I became progressively panicked.

    He came back
Wearing jeans.
He looked concerned and I
 liked the look of his face. He
assessed the situation.
He called the cat off
  sternly
and my ears grew smaller at the sound
            I saw in his hands traces of
    liquids I couldn’t identify
some strange green
He wiped his hands across his jeans
    The cat skulked out

Me, outside of myself and him inside of me
  I disliked the view outside
and thought of the
    poor cat making friends with rain clouds
But I guess that’s what you get for laying on your back
  I quite liked the view
the view
outside

   He put his hand in my hair so that his
finger tips found my skull.
                       I think he was forgetting the rat.