Honest Questions
The woman in the white daisy print, light blue background, housedress,
what does she do all day? What does she do all night?
She is no longer a cafeteria lady at Pierpont Elementary.
Her traditional role has been stolen by cancer.
How does she live half of her life without the man
she was supposed to spend all her life with?
These thirty years--
does she masturbate?
Or does she spend every day washing her sensuality off the walls?
Does she chase the memoried dust out of every corner of herself?
He makes fake plastic pipe bombs at 3:43 A.M.
just to scare the neighbors.
Laying in my bed I am aakened to the slide over
of an oak coffee table--for him to stand on.
Wtih each productin of every design he maps his memories.
Later, he presses those memories into the putty that holds
the whole fucking thing together.
He then spends psychotic hors tapping, tapping
tapping, with a tiny hammer, the bomb, securing it
again and again onto his ceiling.
His ceiling is the floor under my bed.
he has become a Mr. Samsa
and wishes he could kill me
for playing whatever too loudly; loudly
with the grandeur of explosions. That is how he wishes he could live.
Instead, he just makes fake plastic pipe bombs
during the darkest point of the night and adheres
them to his ceiling below my bed with the maddening consistency
of a roach hurling itself again and again against the inside
of a wall.
--Elizabeth A. Scott