(Poem)
Those things meant just to annoy
swarmed through my channel of ordinary thought
like popping hordes of hairy ghetto flies
with attitude.
Swarming were the secondary images
we try to forget or simply wish disappeared
like airport traffic police or Senator Phil Gramm
or home assembly instructions like these glyphs
written by a cow for my new overhead fan,
or paying the young lawyer phonetime
to goose the roofer back up the leaky roof–
The small irritants of normal life that grate,
the expensive food that arrives late
or the skinny kid in the No Fear cap
who mans the one carwash cash register,
spits when he speaks and cannot subtract,
whence my sweet and otherwise pleasing wife
lets drop an imminent weekend visit
by the M.I.L.–
“Aw trucks and ship!” I react
in language altered to protect the kids,
I just knew it was in the air,
could smell it like the baby’s diaper–
Mother-in-law (what a concept)
The M.I.L.– my old grey mill,
machinery to pulverize nature’s solids
driven entirely by wind,
and endlessly;
wheat & barley here,
life as we knew it
there…
I asked without hesitation
“Could you please not in a nice way
say we had planned to remain the same
this weekend, you know– unaffected?”
Maybe “unexposed” was the more polemic as
she’s apt to respond quicker to insult and injury.
Couldn’t we use the malaria excuse again?
Couldn’t we set the spare room on fire with her yarn?
Couldn’t we just say no, perhaps later, in virtual reality?
It’s no use says the wife.
Besides we’re due.
She’s on her way.
I cannot understand this blood rite
that actually would invite (yes, it’s epidemic)
the M.I.L.’s free weekend passage including
bedstay, food sharing, even physical contact
into the veins of one’s private and undisturbed life,
like some lethal robust African virus
infecting the airways with a gene-splicing level-four
green and foul smelling sludge–
but naturally the wife won’t budge…
(minutes later) “Oh M.I.L.,
so nice to see you again.
Don’t know why the kids are crying.”
1993
