There's a caterpillar in my right ear canal.
It's almost neon-green,
with poison-orange bulbs,
the color of grafted cactus.  

It's squeezed its way quite far in, stuffed
itself in as if it were an expanding foam earplug,
the spines stuck in my inner pink skin.

I lean my head to the right, knock
the left side with the flat of my palm.
Eggs, the same as desiccant beads,
the color of earwax, pitter-patter out and onto my table
as if they were plastic raindrops on a trampoline.

There will come a day when it cocoons itself, and that moth
flies free, but until that day, I will continue
to turn it towards you
every time you speak.

A glowering beat ******
shuffles frayed hems over avenue
I, propped up preened,
through the door he trips,
to find a pew
All this, I watch
with a dour view

Down in a beanery where souls are served
coffee with a shot consciousness,
who nibble on curated cakes of ****

Awaiting liberation from these surroundings
It's a cacophony of diatribe, cackles,
Disenfranchised, dim-witted opining.  
Counting,
quarter time of a song I’d sing to myself
if this woman before me would just
stop talking
over the music in my headphones;
she's talking to me from a bag of bones

“You resemble my brother at Microsoft.”
I asked, “well, is that good?”
And then she asks if I too work at Microsoft -
I detach one earplug, and spit at her feet
"I can't imagine why I would."

Crazy. We, those, who dare to thrive
like dew clung to a thin thread of spider silk;
and how we slide
down, in a moment, a little more
when the breeze of our prey,
quivers the chord

My deeper thoughts ride out
on the tip of a swordfish
dipped in fine finned fears;
from the undercurrents of this vicious tide,
to throttle the banshee that screams with eyes
filled with crystal tears,
that fall into my coffee mug
and sweeten the slake
of our bitter drug.

Little do you know that your little gesture
Of putting the second earplug in
Even if I wasn't talking
Hurts me