of her last days. She would pass
away in January, cold and gray
as a San Francisco winter.
When I returned to the macramé,
my fingers struggled over the
knots. I scrapped that project,
but did finish John Lennon.
As for the song, I had lost
the melody and my will to
find it. And the lyrics brought
me back to the fold of the monster.
Crank, You See
isn’t any ordinary
monster. It’s like a
giant octopus,
weaving
its tentacles not
just around you,
but through you,
squeezing
not hard enough to
kill you, but enough
to keep you from
reeling
until you try to get
away. Try, and you
hunger for its
grasping
clutch, the way its
tendrils prop you