Ghazal of Insufficient Research

I wanted to find the enemy in you
but I got distracted.
We stood in a field looking into another field.
Mouse deer came into the field.
Some had all their teeth, others had both their horns.
We called that deeply satisfying.
Fumigators approached, so we made the deer choose ten
favourite flies to shelter in their mouths, then sat them in a circle,
their tails swishing angry little eyebrows in the dust. Next to them
I felt like a robot with limited social experience
and that felt like no bad thing
so I told them of the importance of consistent tense,
how it’s no good to end up doing
what you started out having done.
You had them write “I Remember”s.
One of them wrote, “I remember eating the candles
though the whole cake was laid before me.”
It was a good sentence, but I marked it down for lying—
the cake had gone off and the candles, as always, were delicious.
Grading was tough. We told ourselves they had
no names, needed no names
(we had read this somewhere, to be honest),
but the truth is they wanted them very much.
In the end we put down “1–25. | Deer, Mouse | A/A-/B+”,
left the registrar to sort it out.
I’ll write a ghazal for them in atonement, a proper one
with a refrain and everything.
I’ll call it “Your Choice of Sides”.

Your Choice of Sides

“That’s what she said” is never the right answer
In an interview            things can go wrong so quickly
You get cut and before you think to
Look the gap’s closed up          wasting
The experience with not even          a
Poet’s “or how” to show for it           just
One moment our entrées have          arrived and the next
You’ve ordered the backlist          of Green Integer entire
And me a new formalist          what good can come of that
If I understand a thing          I can learn how to hate it
I am robed in butter          I am full of air
My integrity is preserved at the molecular level
What changes in me changes on its own
It has nothing to do with me
            you have nothing to do with it
Isn’t it dreadful feeling that we might
Scrape away our happiness
And find a better one inside

(‘Ghazal of Insufficient Research’ first appeared in Everyday Genius)