Houseplants

Houseplants
By Circe (1989)

In this heat,
I smell them.
Growing, swelling, with an awful incessancy.
I feel their encroachment,
Their contorted vines spiraling warped,
Fuzzed with tiny alien hairs,
From their hanging baskets above my bed.

I know the insidious fibers of their roots
Straining to shatter the tameness of clay
Into sharp reddened shards.
And I know it is never enough,
This humid exhalation I reluctantly offer.
I know they want more.

Over his shoulder fleeced thinly, dark,
I watch them.
Unfurling subtly downward. Inexorable.
New leaves uncoil with a dim plastic sheen.
Too lush, too verdant, they flourish.

I can only hold him against this horror.
And we are damp, slick in this heat. Mammals.
It is his breath fast against the hot pulse of my throat
That they loathe and long for.

I shudder. The unbearable agony of this greed,
And he is mine, mine, in the brief plunge of these moments.
And they writhe minutely,
Vicious, voracious, as brutal as adultery.

And I, with my belly full of ripening eggs,
My thighs slippery with embezzlement,
Perceive that this rivalry demands some destruction.