And starting tomorrow I will get a couple of days of respite, with a cool night Monday so I can be less irritable when I go to the chiropractor on Tuesday. Later in the week it will heat up yet again, and next weekend hell will return yet again. So it goes, until it's gone. With luck it will be gone by mid-September. Then I'll have to find something else besides the heat to annoy me. No problem. I've always been able to do that.
Right now I have to go out and put some fresh water in the feral cats' bowls, and do a bit of plant watering as well. There's a fine line to walk between a dead landscape and an overdrawn bank account due to an enormous water bill. If I do it right I can avoid both... I hope. This must be done before nightfall, so I can see what I'm watering. It's a drag to use a bunch of water and then discover that it was just soaking a useless patch of gravel or the dead lawn instead of the ground cover.
Sunday Verse
Taxi Music
by Naya Valdellon
It’s become a habit, this backseat
sinking, a refrain on cue like swiping out
late. Outside, the highway plays
its nightly chords, other ways to wheel
you home. Taxi rides are grace notes
on clocked weekdays, luxuries you pocket
at overtime’s end. Save that sometimes,
your ears pay an unexpected price:
Mellow Touch past midnight, its jingle
older than these streets. You are the minstrel
all over again, plucking at memory’s
strings. A dashboard tiger, hardly sinister,
bobs its head to some alto’s crooning.
No hi-hos from the windshield’s dwarvish
seven, audience to the driver’s off-key
mumbling. On-air strumming turns
streetlights, shanties—even the whole city
and moon notated on a sheet of sky—
into instruments, percussive to your
melodious pain. How suburban, the way
sadness is rerouted, recycled like sighs
from chests to airwaves, pitched
as lullabies for wakeful clichés tuned in
to this station tonight. Too taxing,
to remember who it is you’re missing.
A woman belts out someone else’s ache
and somewhere, a girl in a house
you just passed, cries herself to sleep
to this same song. No one is beyond
sappiness. Tomorrow, you will work
despite your bass heart’s drumming.
Upholstery muffles your solo humming.