Let's see if I still remember how to do this.

I had a dream last night  early this morning that Gregor Samsa showed up for breakfast.

                                   I hope someone I know sent this PostSecret.. It's true.


He was sitting at the little ice-cream-parlour table set outside where I go to write in my journal the once or twice a month that I just can't face the internet.

I haven't been able to write. Or read. Or sleep. So I go outside and wait for ducks to land in the pool to seperate night from day.

I had fallen asleep listening to an old writer's almanac podcast. It was the anniversary of the suicide of Virginia Woolf.

The Nazis had just bombed London. She was losing her mind again. "I can not bear the thought that I may never again produce a sentence that brings me pleasure" she wrote, and then walked into the pond.

(I can write my way through war, or out of madness. But if I can't write, I can't live.)


I think I was still asleep when I wandered outside and thought I saw Gregor sitting there. He was thumbing through my Dictionary of Russian Slang, moving his pale lips over Nabokov's notes on the translation of 'cockroach'.

I gave him my fancy Ukranian teacup with the matching saucer. Gregor watched the ducks cruise low in the clotted sky while I rummaged in the pantry for the ancient tin of black tea. A scent like a soiled starched hanky filled the room while it brewed.  I walked across the wet lawn with his tea, spiraled with coils of spoiled half- and -half in the same patterns as the clouds overhead.

"You don't look too bad", I told him, and it was true. He looked like someone bleeding from an internal wound. His hands shook. He sniffed nervously. He cleared his throat repeatedly, but never spoke. He picked up my stale pack of Fantasia's off the table and picked a green one . He tried to light it, but his hands kept dropping the lighter. The cigarette fell open, and he let his fingers scrabble delicately in its shreds, inhaling its scent.

I got up again to get my own coffee.
I was aware of how sleepy I had been.  I went through all my familiar and instinctual motions of intuiting what to feed a waiting guest. All this time, I could feel Gregor's insistence on having breakfast with me.

"He wants me to make his last meal", I thought.

I threw open my refrigerator door like cutting a Tarot Deck. Took out a half-empty jar of borscht, some freegan chopped onions, half a bag of angel-hair coleslaw.

My deepest, prettiest pasta bowl was just the right size. I stirred the onions into the borshcht and sprinkled the cabbage with cinnamon sugar and maple syrup because those Polish men like their vegetables too sweet, and because I could feel Gregor's urgency to eat at a table before he was completely something else. Whatever it was.

I couldn't watch him, but I felt the table shake. I heard little clicking noises as he finished the meal. I felt his pleasure and relief.

I saw the clear, celluloid-stiff points of his wings under his frock coat as he faded away.

A beetle has wings. Nabokov was right.  A cockroach may be an angel in disguise waiting to be fed the best you have.

All the way to work, I was thinking about how I need to get back in the habit of writing again. I wanted an hour alone at a computer, with my thoughts about feeding a Kafka icon metamorphosing into a poem.

I wanted my own wings. Even if I'm feeling like a cockroach myself these days.

Instead, I got seated next to the new 'girl', an old Gulf II veteran with  patchy facial burns that make everyone uncomfortable. She was shy, eager, hungry for talk.

I put aside my need to feel myself capable of poetry again.
 I let my colleague tell me a story of her godmother's house and a recurring ghost and felt sideswiped by something as scalding as flying roadside explosives, as sharp as new-grown wings, as natural, native, and bitter as forgotten food, as long as a sentence that a German diarist might write, hoping that it would give someone pleasure.