The phone rings - a visitor is coming,
So there’s a scramble for the shower
And I, rising later, with a shorter straw
Am last under the water, glowering,
Sluicing ephemeral grime, chasing unsociable grease
Dodging the vagaries of the overworked tank,
Dancing to the vacillating temperament,
The shifting pressures of this unreliable muse.
And I’m thinking about talking, about rhythms of statements,
Words flowing with the water, swirling in the plug;
Matted hair catching some, loosing others.
They come in rushes and clumps,
Spraying off the curve of my back, humped again
Against the rush of cold, then
Wincing back from the spikes of heat.
I do not know what to say:
Tight words, right words of politics and gloom?
Intransigent words of free-flowing consciousness, or
Personal words, particular pictures, intemperate like the water?
I think.
I think I do not know enough.
I cannot speak of politics; won’t talk of Gaza -
Can only guess what it’s like there, project my losses,
My own shocks and horrors, onto something like nothing
I’ve ever seen, separated by millennia, genetic fate,
Privilege like a wedge of solipsistic virtue, distant as the pictures -
Images that cannot hurt you, except in diminishment.
So no Gaza. No Financial Crisis - don’t want to talk about
Bulimic bully nations choking up their stolen lunches,
Receding credit lines badly combed-over with sales,
Euphemisms and hastily-retracted old lies, washed down with plastic cups,
Urged to buy, buy, buy, and by and by we’ll all return
To where we started - the rich rich and the poor poor and middling folk
Talking about it.
So what now - the retreats of my sex and age? Talk domestic?
Shall we have kitchen sinks and chocolate, moral mazes navigating
Food and drink and television? No children - yet - to use.
Or shall I tell you of my lovers - squeeze our interactions,
Work our passions for ergs of creativity, to feed the muse?
I’m rinsed now, wringing hair out, hearing the guest’s chatter
In the room beyond; I’m drying now, waiting for the flow to coalesce,
Idly panning the stream for nuggets, hoping for enough
To buy my lunch. In the end, it’s all about me.