Spring Clean out

Poet's Room

There are mountains, molehills, monsters and
buried dust-covered memories.
I open a drawer and a million bits and pieces
tumble out, daring me
to discard them
daring me to shake them loose
Give them a clean.
Acres of storage clutter my life,
filing cabinets and boxes and within the boxes
layer upon layer of memories
of money changing hands
of decisions made and items taken home
cozy like orphans awaiting renewal, adoption.
Maladjusted memories and endless tautologies
keep sparking in my addled brain.

Alarm bells surround the house outside my brain

I permit myself some weary sighs and sentiments abound

From withering heart beats to my frontal lobes.

A crisis is evolving as I scan shelves and books.

Where is that missing link, that cable, that slot?

That tattered copy of Leaves of Grass with a photo of Walt Whitman?

Desperately lost but finally found, sometimes

Where I last misplaced it.

I need a secretarial service, for lost and  found

Treasured memories in duplicates
discounted at a garage sales.

Sentiments siphoned from the detritus of lifetimes past.

Time’s close encounter with dust and dampness and darkness

with cobweb gift-wrapped boxes in storage under the house,

Busy, dizzy colonies of spiders and ants go about their business.

An unholy mess, at less than arm's length
We live within excesses of excesses

Nature lost in a vacuum of indifference, of wanting

I tie a blindfold and turn to my retreating resolve,

Like new year resolutions cast adrift

Many well-ordered neuroses swept under the carpet.

Conquer Everest today.

An elusive spring clean tomorrow.
I promise to delete old tax records
from decades past
Hidden in a forlorn filing cabinet.
Culling is permitted in this lifetimeWe have to spring clean our bad habits
I wish, I wish, I wish
Repeat three times, or free times
as if ever
and you are halfway there
in a life of half times.