Day in Life

A Poem by Old Person

I. Oatmeal

Adulthood has returned to me the privilege of breakfast
Oats fall dry and silent into my blue bowl
like the slender red arm soaring perfectly around the clock overhead
The day is the same as all days: unraveling
A gray spiel of tissue paper stretching its wrinkles outside of my
sitting house. The washing machine in its lap shimmies coquettishly for me to stay home all day. Clean the pipes. Bleach the gout. Bleach all of the souvenirs I’ve collected to memorialize my functioning life.
But I have to leave so I can age.
Dirt only comes from the outside.

II. Doorway

Insanity is the rote perverted fantasy that change is a kind of solution.
Sanity is keeping your bobby bins biting at their cardboard sleeve so that you do not misplace them.

III. Locking the door, I leave

The big bang hums residually across my wood paneled walls
The neighbors don’t leave, they breathe dust, they are fluent in the language of staying put
They say hi to me like it’s an inside joke. Yeah, we both can tell they sky’s
just wearing her hair differently today. Out of her eyes. Light blue that’s the same all over the world.

Sometimes air here smells like the ocean.
Sexy almost, it pushes me up against the walls of myself
and reminds me there are things that are too hard to clean
like the smell of a coffee pot left on all day
but not as funny

Today it smells like sidewalks eroding. I wonder,
How many different ways are there to make tar?

Do they all fade to gray?
Grounded into whiteness by humanity’s collective interest
in formation. In running paths. In Friday.

IV. Way down to subway

Believing in God is a loophole that requires
tiny gentle fingers

When you undo a knot, you get a horizon

a line between your dreams and your resume

V. Work/Waiting

I eat lunch at 11:50. I toast my bread in a toaster I feel is angry
at my distrust in its abilities. Too many slices have been scraped to flimsy bricks at my desk
where today I stare at Donald Trump’s mouthy eyes and consider the fact that I love him. His body filled with eggs and down feathers. Someone I’ll never ever meet.

My butt is the only part of me that earns a salary
filling a chair for $37,000 a year
shifting next to a burping printer

My hair is everywhere and no more dead than it’s ever been
blonde as hell under these lights.

VI. Crumbs of all the time you’ve lost in the form of children

I can see how children could be an antidote to this. A new vessel to mix up everything you and a man already have in common.

Send her to school, pick her up. Teach her words and the importance of underwear.
Draw lines on her body while she sleeps and make her think she did it to herself.
Dole the dessert
until she should really be helping out with the chores now,
and consecrate dishes as virtues, endings as things to be earned

I don’t care what they say, in my family blonde hair is a dominant trait
with an endless appetite. The world will be destroyed at the same time as us

Dragging its feet, wondering why it wasted so much time turning in and out of darkness