In my air conditioned living room
On my bookshelf
Next to my potted aloe
My house cat sleeps.

In her dream
She springs upon
The young gazelle
Teeth ripping through warm flesh
Her furrough stained
Red with prey.

What do you dream, my cat?
Africa.

Surgery.

I went to the doctor to get this wart on my foot surgically removed. My doctor (who was my favorite karaoke dj in town) told me he wanted to have my feet cut off, send my feet to the lab, remove the wart, reattach my feet with stitches, and let them grow back together. This frightened me, and I told him I wasn’t ready for that. He said they might be able to do it a different way.

So he sent me to this female surgeon who was to do the procedure. I told her about my fear of having my feet cut off, and she told me (in some idiom that only makes sense in dreaming) that she didn’t want that either, and that she wanted to use a drill to get it off. This sounded much more pleasing to me.

I noticed that since doctors have so much to do, they move very quickly and bump into things. When one of the many docs who was buzzing about the place walked by, he bumped my char and sent it spinning. Then he took notice of what my lady surgeon and I were doing, and he decided to observe.

Getting down to the surgery, I was in the chair wearing a pro wrestling tee shirt I owned in middle school (with a misquote from Poe on it) and no pants. I was wide awake and still unnerved that anyone wanted to cut my feet off. So I kept my eyes closed, but I could see silhouettes of everything through my eye lids. The first thing she did was stick a long needle through my waist just to the left of my crotch. She sewed it through me like it had thread, and taped it to my side. Then she started cutting. I couldn’t feel anything, but in the shapes I saw, the part that she removed wasn’t my planters wart at all. The observing doc mentioned it was the biggest growth he’d ever seen. The surgeon held up to the light a silhouette of my detached penis.

And I woke up.