Morning with Ennis

                        Morning with Ennis

                        I’m sure my heart weighs
                        as much as my cat,
                        but is half as purposeful.

                        She leaps a distance
                        three times her height
                        onto a window ledge.
                        I’m looking out the window,
                        instead of writing.

                        Ennis turns rigid and furtive as a green beret
                        watching birds swoop into
                        the backyard, eating the grass seed
                        I cast there yesterday.
                        She speaks, cryptic as Colonel Kurtz
                        in Apocalypse Now:
                        “Eep, eep—qq qq qq.”

                        This is why science fiction doesn’t work for me:
                        Ennis is infinitely more alien than
                        a teal-painted actor with a toilet seat shaped insignia
                        on his trout-skinned tunic.

                        When her soliloquy is finished,
                        Ennis jumps down and lures me into the kitchen.
                        I go, still unable to write.
                        She implores like Dennis Hopper’s character
                        in Apocalypse Now:
                        “Mmm. Map. Owwwwww!”

                        She wants food, but I see there is food
                        in her dish.
                        She continues: “Owwwwww!”
                        Right.
                        She wants a tuna melt.

                        I comply, her oversized homunculus.