Windex
And that was when I realized
that I really fucked up this time.
when the windex bottle beat
a blue stain into the Berber carpet
and I was left standing wide-mouthed
in an open-mouthed doorway.
That long hall never seemed so short.
That fuming man never seemed so tall
and that was when I realized that what I did
I never really remembered anyway.
How quickly did my mistakes,
or lack thereof,
transcend through the contents
of that plastic cleaning bottle?
When did it explode
onto the scene and leave a trail
of Oh-My-Gods or
You-Fucking-Bitch's that I was quite prepared for?
Did I ever really know how to duck
the verbal abrasions like I learned
how to dodge that bottle?
Or did the bottle dodge me?
Maybe if it had hit me
I would have become clean
and without streaks I could have glistened
into a transparent pane
on a rectangular plane.
Why couldn't I disappear?
Why couldn't the words hit me
and bounce off like birds?
They left smears, greasy trails
of You-Dirty-Little-Whores
and Get-The-Hell-Outta-My-Sight's.
and as I slammed my door shut
to FD&C Blue No. 1
daddy's little girl turned blue too
and with my eyes closed
I couldn't see the glass fragments
of my insides shatter anymore.
“wide-mouthed” and “opened-mouthed” sound weird being so close together. Love the part, “maybe if it hit me I would have become clean”, it reminds me of a poem where a young girl is subjected to racism and she scrubs herself till her skin burns in the shower trying to clean her body of her skin color. “Without streaks” seems a little reiterative of clean and unnecessary to have in the poem. I liked the adding of blue at the end, conveying the emotion and the literal dye in the bottle of Windex. The questions at the end all close together is very claustrophobic and needs to be thinned out and possible spread out. Otherwise it is a very compelling piece.
ReplyDelete