I'd like to think my work ethic alone
Is upholding the whole economy
40 hour weeks; I'm weary, I'm weak
All my coworkers want to go home
College applications and careers and bleach
Chlorine on my skin in the shower
But
Introducing... Oliver!
Pedantic, egocentric
My ace of diamonds, black sheep of royalty
Red splatters on white skin, he likes blood
I'm planning excavation
Digging under your pink with bitten nails
Undercover lover, he holds me without me having to ask,
Advertises me without having to ask.
He doesn't have hubcaps
Or a nine to five
He lives ghetto
His apartment is a beige wreck
Far from that American dream where the doors, the houses, the housewives are smothered in 2 coats of polyurethane
He has the furniture money can't buy
Charisma, degeneracy, and audacity for eons
The amalgamation of anticapitalist and 7 lovers I once held
Spera's hair of charred, cheap copper. The kind they used to use for s in roaming houses. My fingers find it even when I try to keep my hands to myself.
He has Pearsons rugged aptitude and girlish, greek hands. They catch me, let me go, the morph into my recovery.
He has John's bourbon on the table, his Bailey's after work
but doesn't hate it like Nathan. Alcohol is the muse, not the vice.
I hear the same awful singing in him that Matthew used to make me laugh; it is Oliver's favorite weapon to see me smile.
He has my Rose's scent of mystery yet reason, withholding obtuseness and optining for blue, transparent glass in his office building unemployed.
And for dessert, he has my wife's weird, nerdy sense of humor.
He's immaterial
He's unethereal
He's normally strange like an alloy of steel
I still want him
His little quirks, I dream about
He''s reminded me I don't have to apply to Vanderbilt
Or Brown
Or even UofM
Something more than survival, more than ordinary is unnecessary
But I love applying myself
In thick coats of polyurethane.
YOU ARE READING
An Enigma Is Too Much For A Cat To Eat
Poetrypoetry from the raw heart of a teenage girl. I wrote this poetry collection throughout my junior year of high school, when so much change was underneath the sun's aura. In and out of depression, in and out of the psych ward, I survived the first ha...
