Dishes

A Poem

Standing in the kitchen, staring at the Fallujah leftover from the night before.

Who made fucking pudding?

No counter space left for the nakedest of eyes to see. Glasses stacked in a Seussian precariousness, silverware, the fallen soldiers of a massacre, a genocidal conflict between cutlery and crockery Plates, oh the humanity. Neither pre-rinse, nor consideration for the duration of the subsequent war crimes tribunal

How is every square inch of the counter covered?

No idea how three people could be so horrifically gluttonous

Panic sets in, as the clarity of the chaos becomes acute.

I cannot clean anything, because THE DRYING AREA IS FULL OF DIRTY, FUCKING DISHES!

Sweet mother of Christ, your son gave himself willingly for this savagery?

Our savior morphs into our damnation, with bated breath and hope for generations to come, the dishwasher opens revealing… disgorging a chilling truth;

A mass grave for the dirtier, redneck cousins of the dead littering the countertop

I came downstairs this morning and wanted to sit at my laptop and make more progress through my eternally long reading list here on Medium, when I heard the sucking noise of a chest wound issuing forth from my kitchen. My reading list forgotten, I went into triage mode, almost, ALMOST giving up at one point, but I soldiered onward toward peace and reconciliation.

This piece is meant as a reminder to take care of your shit early, often, and always, not letting what can be done today wait for tomorrow, but also as a brief respite from my recent spate of extremely depressing, frustrating, and personally challenging pieces I have been publishing of late. I hope you all can relate a little bit.

On that note, we can make a fun and hopefully entertaining challenge out of this.

Write a poem about a daily, weekly, or monthly, routine task in a hyperbolically dramatic way. Creativity is encouraged and no task is too small to detail! I look forward to any and all responses. Have fun with it!

Zivah Avraham Franco Amati & her ocean Nen Nomad Claire Kelly Chrysa stergiou Seana Ridge Edward Swafford Joe Glacken Nancy Santos Jason Edmunds Martin Morrison John Hansen John Haslam Ryan Ehrhardt Praise Frank Benighted Arie Castle Heather Lengyel