A Quick Succession of Busy Nothings

A personal fiction poem about the heavy price of food in the US.

I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.

---Franz Kafka

 

I am driven to the grocery store, my skin as white

as the snow still to come. I load up my reusable plastic

tote bags with TV dinners of many kinds in the frozen aisle.

I do not cook for myself, am overweight, my belly

peaks out of my one green t-shirt.

The trees are all teeth and they chew me like cud.

I'm watching Mad Men, I like it so far.

How about frozen Mexican? It'll be Halloween soon.

I'm Charlestoning from head to toe right out of my life.

I'm sick of poetry, I'm lying fallow, abstractions bore me,

I'll never write again. Apologies to Anne Carson,

but I can't fall in love with wolves or with sheep.

It's all ice in sawdust these days. A word of advice:

Never say anything you'll live to regret

because Apology's a Currency no one accepts.

Noon strikes like a glove. Everything is so expensive now,

living and eating, waking and sleeping,

　　　　　　　but luckily we all live in a hologram,

so I'm comforted my hunger is only a loquacious illusion.

Let's sit still and pretty, pretend it's not price-gouging.

I see myself in Pete Campbell, I'm proud and indignant.

In my mind's eye, I am a thin and glamorous woman

in a red bell-coat and white muff (I'm five percent bisexual).

Come on, take the cat out of the hummingbird's mouth.

Inside me is a forest of bronze mirrors, glass rods and lumber,

spruce violins, two-man toothed bowstrings making music,

sawing wood. Is that what festers beneath my burlap skin?

My conversations with people are menial and stupid.

I’ve stopped asking for others to witness me.

I peel myself each morning and devour my own rind.

I'd like for my tongue to start speaking without filler words.

War is everywhere, nearly anywhere,

　　　　　　　and it is a golden, somnolent autumn.

I step out of the store without paying for my food.

A siren starts wailing, but I am right out

and never caught. Am driven home in oblivious silence.

Author's Note

Published by Lumina Journal, Issue #21, April 2025:
https://www.lumina-journal.com/a-succession-of-busy-nothings

Reviews

[Vol]

I hope you are lying and will continue poeting... I had a wise ole pet friend, James C. Floyd, "The Jefferson Street Poet," who told me, Poems do not reveal the poet, they do not even revel themselves, no, poetry is there to reveal something in the reader. You make important points with a powerful voice. Now, if we could only get people to read it!
Vol

[Sean Eaton]

Thank you for your kind words.

The line "I'll never write again" represents the fear that strikes me whenever I go through a creative dry spell. But it always goes away eventually, and I always end up writing something new. I have four poems being published in May 2025, and I will post them to this site after they go live.