Ms. Pac-Man

My friend and I were playing Ms. Pac-Man (I don't have a proclivity for video games but I like dark rooms and lazy Sundays, and it was so out of context maybe I could count it as an Artist Date) and I was actually zooming through one of the boards (what's that rhyme that doesn't really rhyme: "Make believe you're confident/and you may find/you're just as confident as you pretend you are") at which point my friend said, "Wow, you're doing great!" And right when he said that, I got killed by a ghost.

I've behaved this way before--like when I was little taking a Tiny Tumbleweeds gymnastics course at the YMCA my teacher told me I was really close to doing a pull-up and right then I let go of the bar and thumped down on the mat.

So GAME OVER. Classic self-sabotage. Then I thought, "Maybe the real self-sabotage is that I'm wasting my time playing Ms. Pac-Man."

So this is how I tried to justify it: She's not Mrs. Pac-Man or Miss Pac-Man. She is MS. Pac-Man. She is the Gloria Steinem of video games. If you catch her in a slow moment and look closely at her skin, you can see she has a tattoo of Rosie the Riveter. She believes in the radical notion that 8-bit creations are people.

Then I start getting really sad, watching this little leg-less lady swimming through this maze, and I scribbled this down on a napkin, which I found this morning crumpled in with my tax forms (O Life!):

Every night
In search for fruit
I'm devoured by ghosts.
The breathless turn blue
As they pass through
Digital thresholds.
Overlapping eyes
Pinball in their heads
Like Chagall's happy goats.

I can only reincarnate
so many times.
One, two, one, two,
Blinky, Pinky, Inkey, Sue.
No more girl-on-girl crime.

Keep your pellets
Out of my uterus.