I’D LIKE TO WRITE A THOUGHTFUL POEM,
I’D LIKE TO WRITE A SOOTHING SONG,
BUT ALL I CAN DO
IS YELL AT YOU
BECAUSE THE CAPS LOCK IS STUCK ON.
Clock
Already ten o’clock?
When did it come to this?
Maybe time would be on my side
If I had a clock right on my left wrist.
Letting Me Work
If you let me work,
I’ll let you play.
Then maybe tomorrow
we can trade!
Perfectly Content
One book about the way things were,
and five books about how things could be
for a moment, when the photographer pushes
the last bottle of San Pellegrino onto the shelf,
rotates it into perfect order,
steps down, and snaps the picture.
Or maybe he has an assistant, so he doesn’t have to step down.
In the one book, he talks about washing and drying the knives,
coating them in tallow, wrapping them up,
storing them,
getting them out for the next meal, washing off the tallow,
and using them.
This one book is all it takes to make me perfectly content with my kitchen.
Too Content
Someone once told me I was too content.
If only she knew how perfectly discontented I was.
I was just at the point where I was ready to learn
what to expect,
who to ask,
what to do,
where to go.
All My Exercise
Some people like to drive their car
so they can walk inside a gym.
There is a gym in walking distance.
I might walk there and back again.
Some put washers in their closets.
You can do that, I don’t care.
I get all my exercise just
going up and down these stairs.
Knobs and Tubes
I’m starting to wonder
if the knobs and tubes were built into the house
or if they were added later.
It’s hard to imagine that,
after thousands upon thousands of years of sooty light,
that there was someone ready to install
the odorless electric light
(and all the necessary wires)
way out here, in the middle of the Great Plains,
by 1902. Twenty-three years after Edison’s forty-hour lightbulb.
And if these wires were strung before the plaster,
which, in many ways it seems they must have been,
what an electrician!
A daring man, working with this new form of fire,
stretching out the hots and neutrals,
wrapping them around the knobs, through the tubes,
to this room.
A man of great foresight–
he put wall outlets in when there was hardly a thing to plug into them.
I hope he would be pleased to see
all that I have plugged in
right now.
Photo credit: http://www.ge.com/about-us/history/1878-1904