She hopped on the elevator
and pressed six.
I pressed seven
and the elevator door rattled shut.
“There’s a lot of crazies up on the sixth floor,” I told her.
She smiled shyly. “I just moved in.”
“I used to live on the sixth floor.”
She nodded politely
and winced a smile.
“I probably should be saying this,
but there is this one woman
with red curly hair
who always wears bright red lipstick.
She’s the craziest of the lot.”
The elevator stopped and the door opened.“Ahh, thanks...,” the new attend
any said all tongue-tied,
when the door shut
and she was gone.
I rode the elevator up the next level,
feeling a little crazy myself,
for talking so candidly.
You don’t know how to behave in front of people,
I kept hearing myself say.
So I discussed it with Joana little later on.
“I didn’t mean to scare the new resident or anything,” I said.
“Don’t be silly. That redhead really is crazy.”
“Yeah, but....”
“Oh, it’s fine. You were just making conversation.”
Joan slipped on her coat.
We stepped out into the hallway
and she locked the door behind her.
“...People like to hear that kind of stuff.”
“I guess, you’re right.”
On the way down,
the elevator stopped on the sixth floor.
The crazy woman with curly red hair
and bright red lipstick got on.
“How are you two doing?”
she asked very cheerfully.
“Good, and you?”
The crazy woman rolled her eyes back.
“I’m going crazy,” she said,
“but I’m not dangerous.”
She laughed at the joke.
The irony of it all, I thought,
that the crazy woman would repeat exactly what Joan and I had just said,
as if to confirm how odd everything was
that related to her.
It’s amazing.
I felt my head whirl about.
A poem had started to germinate.
I could recognize the signs:
dry mouth,
sweaty palms,
sweaty temples
and armpits,
a hemorrhaging of dovetail sentences in the speech area of my brain,
a quick sense of euphoria,
trembling hands,
dilating pupils....Then all at once,
the elevator walls started waving good-by;
the buttons began to dance
and Dixie music started to play in my ears.
The smell of burnt plastic filtered
through my nose-trails.I started to feel sick.
The the elevator came to a jarring stop
and the crazy woman sailed into the lobby.“Hey, Sammy, you don’t look to well,” Joan exclaimed.
I fumbled about in some literary paroxysm.“Are you okay?” she asked.
I could hear the concern in her voice,
but couldn’t focus on her face.
My breath was getting heavy.
I took a step and leaned against the elevator door for support.“I think I’m having a poem attack.”
