it’s a bit like clockwork, the way she
moves through the quadrants of her tidy
little life, a whirring of gears and minutiae and little things
no one ever thinks of, a bit like eight
fifteen in the evening when the chopsticks click
haphazard and helpless over bland takeout
left over from noon while the alarm
blinks red and broken and
tireless.
sometimes she makes lists. here is the car at the door,
here is the frost on the doorstep, the ice on the stairway.
here is the dumb generator that won’t shut up, and there,
by the road, is the sign that tells exactly how far
away humanity is. here
are the sounds i heard the TV make, a
confused cacophony of phonemes and empty
rhetoric, and this now is the warm tremble of
the coffee machine as it
drips drips drips its daily dose of
sleep deficiency, and there is this also, and this—
and
at night the faucet gurgles like a child and
the dying lightbulb flickers over the
dirty bathroom tiles, makes them gleam like swift
pale birds against a gunmetal sky, and
she watches them through the crack in the door,
shivers under the worn covers. she tries to say something
but her voice cracks, so she reaches for the pen,
and then for the warm secret space behind the headboard.
in her journal she writes
Dear diary, today I
gave the car a name, so I would have
someone to
talk to.
This has got to be one of the best poems I've read. Taking out all the capitilisations was extremely effective in conveying the dull, monotonous sort of mood that the poem had (well, that's what I found it to be like). Your use of enjambment was spectacular. You seem to be able to write in such a great way that I can imagine and almost feel everything in my mind.
Also, I found that I could almost hear the chopsticks clicking in my head. Maybe I'm crazy, maybe you're brilliant. Maybe it's both.
