Snow | Apartment 221

Snow is better than rain. It's like happy rain. Rain seems so angry while it dives and throws itself at the ground in a hurry like business people at the airport wearing their Armani ties and scowls. Snow is like the little children at the airport that are on their way to celebrate thanksgiving. Even though their parents tug them along with their hands that aren't preoccupied with carseats and diaper bags, the kids still toddle all over getting excited about automatically flushing toilets and those automated airport trash cans that compact the trash inside to make room for other trash. Snow takes its time on its way down from the sky and enjoys the view of the world at different heights.
My mom liked the snow too. On snow days when I was in elementary school she would buy packets of Kool-Aid and shake them out over the ground to write our names in the snow. Then we would race to see who could lick up their name the fastest. My dad's from Florida so he hated the cold. He would yell that we would get frostbite unless we came inside right away. He didn't really understand that you can't get frostbite when it's 34 degrees outside. But my mom and I would humor him and come inside to write limericks about winter. She always said that writing was the best way to remember. She said that a poem is like a fishing net that catches fish-but the fish were memories. I told her that I hated fish because they tasted like sewage and hotdogs were better.
So it's snowing today. There are three feet of snow outside of Dreamwood Terrace.
I watch the snowflakes outside my window serenely mosey their way through the air.
For a second it's like I revert to my childhood. The cupcake shop doesn't open for an hour so my brain shuts off and my body throws on a coat, grabs my keys, and sprints to K. Rogers to buy Kool-Aid powder. I get back to my apartment and the autopilot disengages. I look in the grocery bag clenched in my hand and see a bright red box of black cherry flavored Kool-Aid packets. "What a fucking waste of money" I growl to myself.
After helping Christine close up for the night I remember that I've been needing to run by the Sunny Side Up diner to get my toilet plunger back from Flo who borrowed it on Thursday. Walking down the block with snow flurries getting caught in my eyelashes, I run Auden's words through my mind "And death put down his book." Snow always makes me think of my mother. I get to the counter where this new employee-she looks like she's maybe in college?- is reading Slaughterhouse Five.
You know when you are thinking of something and then you want to say something else to someone but instead of saying what you want to say, you say what you were thinking? Yeah.
I meant to ask where Flo was but instead I quoted, "And death put down his book."
I am one panty-dropping bastard.
Before I embarrass myself further, I give up and walk out the door where the cold greets me with a stifling bear hug. And then that employee scurries out after me explaining that some speed dating thing is beginning and her shift is almost over and would I like to go bowling and did she mention her name was Lucia? It's like she's a film on fast forward. I hate bowling but Christ, her eyes are so blue they are painful to look at and I don't want to hurt her feelings-so I agree.
Damn it. I just wanted to get my plunger back.

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.

Rain | Apartment 221

The day started with rain. The day ended with rain. I hate the rain.
I went to visit my dad today. The car wouldn't start. When it finally did I had to drive through damn Niagara falls just to get to the county mental hospital. The nurses say he's been doing better.
"He hasn't attempted suicide in over a month!" says this nurse. She is way too happy. Her eyes are too big and her teeth are too white. I don't know why she's caring for depressed old men who need to be babysitted in case they try to kill themselves when she should just quit and work as a Disney princess or something.
"Oh great" is my answer, what else am I going to say?
You know, when you're eighteen, young, tortured, and full of angst, girls think you're sexy when they find out that your mother slit her wrists and your father got checked into into a mental hospital afterwards because of repeated attempts at suicide. When they find out that you're an aspiring poet the girls pretty much throw themselves at you. They say they want to be your muse. Ten years later? Not the case. People just worry about you.
The nurse looks at me with a weak, pitying smile and escorts me to the common area where my dad sits, dilapidated, like a deflating balloon.
He asks how work is, as usual. "The lawyers at Barnum and Butler are treating you good, right?"
I don't correct him and tell him that it's "well" instead of "good." Instead I say "Oh yeah it's great. I'm feeling good about it all. I've had some interesting cases recently." Okay, yes I am lying. I've been lying. The nurses said not to bring up poetry and my dreams of being a writer because it reminds him of mom, she being a poet too. "And I bought the penthouse at Dreamwood Terrace," I add. "I love spending time there." This is not completely a lie. I do love spending time there, just not as a resident. I clean it. Yeah. I'm that bohemian starving poet stereotype that cleans the seventh floor penthouse while living in apartment 221, a shitty second floor loft. I've always wanted to be up at the top of the building on the sixth or seventh floor. I get six hours up there every three days and sometimes I pretend it's my apartment. I pretend that my diet consists of something other than ramen noodles and an occasional banana. Of course I can't tell dad any of this.
After lying to dad for about forty minutes and listening to him telling me that I am too skinny and I need a girlfriend for another twenty two, I fold myself into some origami figure to squeeze into the driver's seat of my 1986 Honda Accord. I am the only guy I know whose car is as old as he is. No wonder I don't have a girlfriend. My fountain pen in my pocket digs into my leg whenever I use the clutch.
I drive back through the rain to get home. God, I hate the rain.
I stopped hearing the rain outside at about six when I was cooking my ramen noodles for dinner. I looked out the window, hoping to see the sun. No sun. Only a foggy abyss of blech. An hour later the power goes out. I find my flashlight under the kitchen sink but it's out of batteries. Awesome. I go to sleep at seven forty one.
I am just drifting off when I hear the rain start again. Stupid rain.