The Mess

My house is always a mess.
How can one person
have so many words strewn about?
I wake up, a whole story is jumbled
next to my pillow,
the’s and it’s
sticking to the sheets.

I once got to brush my teeth
squeezing toothpaste with
pulpous and semisolid mushed in.
I washed my hair with
moistened, slippery and mango-scented.

League Spartan Crackers by Skylar Cheung

I’m tired.
Tired of the words
crunching underfoot, cheerios
smushed into the carpet, never
devolving to earth.
Of climbing over
boxes of disconnected words
belonging once to poems, essays,
fiction and non,
rumbled-jumbled
tipsy-toppled
in the kitchen, in my chest
of drawers, everywhere.

An old friend came over today,
Ann’s words are
stacked neatly in one corner
of her work or
in a cupboard or
tied up with string and cord
to hold them
to preserve them
for future use.

She stepped through
vestibule, narthex and portal,
sloshed through the word waves
to the couch
which included antechamber.
“Hoarding words, gold coins in your eyes,
useless unless you use them,”
Ann admonished me
as she stirred her tea
with spork.

I confessed my secret
These are the words left
from vain attempts,
from unpublished stories,
from plays with no actors,
from essays with no voice
to fight for them.
How can I treat them as garbage
even if others did?

“You use to write poems
you use to write verse
you use to write rhyme
sonnets and ballads,
why not this time?”
(Ann is not a poet and she
knows it).

We swept the kitchen for
rune and song
odes and lyrics.
The basement. Oh.
The piles of sagging tropes and titles
even found a farce long dead
I wrote in 1999.
We laughed so hard reading
our guffaws re-attaching
the narratives.

Merriment glues
and chortles bring back
what stories once were.
After hours of hard work
dirty graphite hands,
we had at least one poem
ready for removal.

And so,
here in your hands then
is my attempt
to clean out my house.

Listen to Tereasa Maille read “The Mess.”