Lawn Mower Lady

The plight of the obsessive compulsive lawn mower becomes the plight of an attention deficit disordered writer and reader.

 

LAWN MOWER LADY

 

Lawn mower lady,

your noise pollution

kills the air

and ruins the birds;

they were singing,

but now they just cry.

 

Her machine splits

the ants,

their bodies litter

her shirt with insecticide,

children cradle their ears

and bend in disgust,

her skins hang

over the handle-

her obesity

obsessive compulsive:

she cannot stop the grass

or the food.

 

Broom broom!

bang bang!

sounds the fat cry:

some forms of life

must pay everyday

with every insecure

dendrite.

Blades of grass die,

but they always grow back

synchronous with the commercial voices

that pinch her conscious; her control is muted.

the grass hates her more

than ever

and this hatred extends into

the seething summer days,

so she busts out with the wheels

and swims vacantly through the humidity,

sweat reeking of last night’s over-imbibitions  

and empty foils shaped like heart attacks.

 

Woman, you really should find

some other outlet

to plug your corpulent system into,

just let the static

light the tears

as they press against your

ocular caves,

you cannot tame them forever

or persecute nature

by fouling it

with scanning knives,

most unnatural,

digging up the brown dust

in concentrated rows,

aborting the growths

that attempt to spread your eyes

and shift your vision inward

where fetal soothsayers

scream at the closed portal:

they will be breached

should you chose to stifle them

with innutritious clumps.

 

But the disquietude

does not halt,

she rips up the silence:

the rusted monster a vehicle

for her subjective depression.

The lawn, ravaged like a leper,

punished by a sadistic glutton.

Selfish, her need to disgorge the scars,

immortal in her imagination,

persistent agitator of the ambiance.

All and sundry barricade their ears,

attempt to deliver themselves

from the deliberate and screeching pandemonium.

 

This woman’s tool,

a strange defense,

built by an engineer

whose intentions unmindful

of the harassing grates, consequent of his invention.

Painful percolations in tinnitus canals,

the neighborhood 

rings with consternation,

as a plot of land raped

by a compulsive gorgon

with an apparatus exhausted by

the perpetual itch

to exorcise an archfiend

only she can see.

  

 Once upon a time young lady lived in a basement. Young lady liked to keep her basement window open in the summer time: the basement window was level with the lawn between the house in which she resided and the neighbor's house. Young lady had a very serious 

case of attention deficit disorder and ten

ded to be hyper-alert to any stimuli, visible and/or audible, that existed in her environment. She had immense difficulty filtering out any stimuli that was not relevant to her tasks or areas of focus. To her misfortune, oversized lady with strange compulsion became her new neighbor. Take notice: every person, family, or group of people that ever resided in the house next to her window were highly defective and indulged in nasty habits that pricked her nerves like a thousand mosquitoes. Why such people were com

pelled to live in that house and perpetuate her suffering is a rather uncanny phenomenon in itself. Anyhow, oversized lady with strange compulsion became young lady's new haunt. The strange compulsion was this: mowing the lawn EVERYDAY. Now, there is no reason to mow lawn EVERYDAY because once the lawn has been mowed it is unnecessary and futile to mow it again until the lawn begins to grow and becomes a potential threat to the visibility or accessibility of the home. The compulsion of oversized lady always managed to be synchronal with young lady's reading hour. Reading hour was a highly important and essential element in her day; if she, for some reason, could not read during reading hour....all went black. And black it went, day in and day out, for just as she opened her book with enthusiastic glee, the "mowing" of the mower would cancel out any attempt to concentrate. Young lady required "least possible noise disturbance" to focus on a book; even the distant song of a bird was capable of destroying her attempt to engage. But, you see, oversized lady was not just oversized, but lawn

 mower lady to boot. One can only imagine the state of young lady when, as she opened her book, the roar of the lawn mower never failed to seize the moment. Young lady became very, very angry. Young lady gritted her teeth until they became filed to the gums. Young lady hated lawn mower lady. Young lady's summer time reading hour was annihilated. Resentment, hell, damnation, fat, and lawn mowers. The end

Author's Note

I wrote this years ago. It is a true story. The lawnmower lady, however, has been quiet so far this summer. Heaven's!

Reviews

[The Water Queen]

quite the intense and powerful read.

[deeps]

My goodness this is real you say. Wow
Quite the powerful read here.