No, my name is not Gregor Samsa

From my vantage point
the sky is blue glass.

If I weren't lying on my back
I could hear the sky spewing
globules of red salsa.

But Kafka lived in Prague,
not the Bronx.

He could have lived
in Texas.
"Dang," I can hear him saying,
"Aren't we good.
God bless America."

Lying on my back
I am an urban firecracker
of freedom,
attar of roses
with every bang.

Reaching for the sky
a cockroach doesn't
have a chance.
It ain't nothing like the story
of the prodigal son.

Nein, Ich bin nicht Gregor Samsa.

Still, it will be,
that rimy mercy
in a boot,
bathos like grace
spilling from upended
blue.

The Hunt of the Unicorn

A fine day, it would seem, the white castle
in the distance, baby trees hung with fruit,
the red-capped huntsmen out for a spring spree,
though, to do them justice, they don't look that
thrilled with the task of killing: A day's work,
they tell their wives, leaving in the morning.
So here they are, bunched up in a clearing,
actors in a passion play of thrashing
hooves, gore, knowing they'll get her in the end.
And only one civilian death, they'll say,
reporting back to the men on the hill.

But not in this garden where

a trembling hummingbird sucks
the juice of a hibiscus.
White, fleshy, she unfolds
to him, unwilling but
willing, since opposites
are just words, anyhow.
As are fear, and shame.

In the end she doesn't
become a swan, like the one
he kills in the first act,
but an old woman, dependent
on others.
As she always has been.

It's snow, not desert,
trees blue on the ground.
Death comes like a fall
through a hole in the ice.
Of her death, no judgment
can be uttered.
Forgiveness, punishment,
there's no either-or.
Just metaphor.

Carola Walton is a social worker and lives with her husband in New York City, where they are avid opera goers. In a previous life she played tin whistle in an Irish Ceile band. Poems have been published in Barrow Street.