Auden | Apartment 221

So my boss Magdalene Bitch fired me a few days ago. She said something about "dust complaints" or whatever. Essentially, because I am not tall enough to dust the top of the ceiling fan blades, I am not fit to clean any square inch of an apartment. Never mind the fact that I have scoured poop residue from both toilets in the penthouse for the past year and a half. Oh no, it's not like I have been splashed in the face with toilet water when I get really into my scrubbing. 

So while I'm looking for a job I decided that I should stick to the cleaning business since being a full time writer will not even pay for gas and people who drop out of college after their first year are not in very high demand in the job market. College professors are all idiots anyway. They are all teaching creative writing because they can't do it themselves. Poets like myself are better off without failed authors suffocating our creativity and imprisoning our inspiration. Anyway, now I am a dishwasher for Christine's Cupcake Palace or Christine's Cupcakes or whatever it is called. Miss Wright, my new boss has so many sticks up her ass. I don't know how many but I could build a hell of a bonfire out of them. 

Asking me to wash each dish four times in her psychotic way... 

I bet she doesn't even appreciate ee cummings. 

I can't even go to work today though since I woke up feeling disgusting. I meant to get my flu shot earlier in the season but whenever I go to the Minit Clinic there are thousands of screaming Doctor Brian fans. They're all women. They're all scantily clad. They're all oblivious to anything that isn't Doctor Brian. I wish I was Doctor Brian. 

Everything ached. My legs felt like soggy spaghetti. Not even al dente spaghetti. My legs were the spaghetti that you leave in the pot too long and then remember to eat but then have leftovers and have to refrigerate to eat again tomorrow for lunch. I tried to toboggan out of my bed wrapped in my blanket cocoon and roll out of my bedroom but I ended up hitting my head on the floor that I really should carpet. Getting to the kitchen proved to be an ordeal from which I emerged bearing four bruises, a scrape (from that broken floorboard that I really should fix), and a desire to go back to bed. My mom used to say that a cup of tea, fresh air, and WH Auden could fix anything so I made myself a cup of tea (I hate tea; it tastes like dirt and water), put on some sorry excuse for pants (My sweatpants have more holes that a colander but it's unusually warm outside and I don't care what people think), grabbed a copy Look, Stranger! (My mom's favorite), and shuffled to my door. 

I don't care if I get other people sick. I will actually be helping them learn a lesson to get their flu shots in the future. Such a caring soul. 

One and a half steps outside and I am absorbed in Auden’s words. 

That later we, though parted then, 

May still recall these evenings when 

Fear gave his watch no look; 

The lion griefs loped from the shade 

And on our knees their muzzles laid, 

And Death put down his book. 

My mother’s favorite poem. She had the top corner of this page folded down so she could flip to ‘A Summer Night’ in cases of emergency. I run the backs of my fingers down the weathered (mom called it “well loved”) spine, careful not to disrupt the fragile bits of paper flaking off. A funeral bulletin falls out of its hiding place between the last page and the back cover. The picture of mom smiling on the cover reminds me that I haven’t opened this book since I read ‘A Summer Night’ at her funeral in 2003. 

I throw the bulletin into the next trash can I see.