Unnecessarily Angsty

I am a ravid hater of angsty poetry. (And yes, ravid is a word. I don't know if my brain was trying to say avid, or rabid, and really, the combination of the two seems perfectly appropriate.) And so it is not helpful to my self loathing when I myself am the author of much reviled angsty poetry, but such is life.

Thus I present the short poetry/prose created during a particularly angsty moment this very morning, when I clearly should have been sleeping. May it henceforth sit alongside Eliot and Ezra Pound as a (lesser) inexplicable blight on the world.

***

Sometime, a long time ago, something happened. A cloth that should have been thick was worn thin. And all that should have been warmed was left exposed and withered and cold.

And today, I can’t help it. I keep trying to cover in layers. And I bathe in trauma. I bask in trauma. I let people’s tears dry on my skin, and the deep mud of misery fills all the cracks. Layer after layer, until one day I'll barely feel.

And I think, this last layer will be enough. It will make me feel warm. Or it will make me feel cold. And perhaps those two things are the same.

So I wait.

But What, Exactly, Do You Do?

I have removed all of the postings from seven different bulletin boards, and then replaced the same postings in a slightly more visually-pleasing pattern.
I have re-alphabetized the alphabetically-ordered names stored in two card index boxes, twice.
I have extended tenuous tendrils towards potential office gossip, so far to no avails.
I have sat, patiently, contemplating my pension plan, and the fact that I’m not really sure what a pension plan is, and that a part of me dies every time I think of myself as a person who thinks about pension plans.
I have played pool and lost.
I have played shuffle board and lost.
I have played scrabble, and would have won, but we didn’t keep score.
And…umm…there were some emails, too.

Four weeks down, forty-one years to go.