Frozen Mushrooms

            Now that I’ve broken my fast I’m planning on trying to break my old snacking habits and to only eat three times a day, except for some fruit in between if I feel peckish.

            On Saturday I pretty much finished the prose piece that I am required to write as accompaniment to my poetry manuscript for my final project of the Canadian Poetry course. Since this is not an essay and there is no thesis to prove, there doesn’t seem to be very much over which to agonize in this particular paper. It should be all right if I make sure there are not a lot of repetitions of words, poor punctuation and stunted flow. I won’t consider it done until I can read it through aloud without making a single correction. I orated the thing about twenty times throughout the day, making adjustments each time until I had nothing more against it.

            I made a big salad for dinner and wanted to put a few mushrooms on it but the mushrooms had gotten frozen because I’d recently defrosted the fridge which always makes it very cold for a few weeks so I decided to fry the mushrooms, but it still took quite a while for the bigger ones to thaw.

            I took some time to start tweaking the poems that I wrote for my final project. Here’s a revised version of one that I wrote in the fall:

The Rat

A rat ran across Bathurst

making its nightly rounds

nose like a dagger

spotted like a heifer

belly to the ground

Its back so much higher

than its scavenger’s beak,

had that rat-slant forward

but more enormous

than the rats that I’d seen

But when I got home I wondered

“Was it really a rat?”

On an internet searcher

typed “rat-shaped monster”,

and here’s what came back

It was up from the southland

trying hard to be free

it had skipped passing customs

and is now playing possum

where it’s less good to eat.