The Cycle
Michael J. Menges
The wash machine pounds incessantly with a hundred hearts’ precision
While my own heart beats with an out-of-rhythm drum-throb’s impatience.
My cigarette smoke swirls in the white-walled room, like the lakefront
Skyline of Michigan, tribute to a city’s, people’s addiction to the automobile habit
And I remember the girl who wouldn’t grace a fellow (me) with her made-up lace
And presence unless he drove a car (and excreted in the air
An oxymor-ous poison and procreation of life and death the wash machine can’t scrub.
But clean my clothes will be.
The water fills the machine like paper piling in my office
Until I feel almost as drowned as my garments.
The machine is as jammed as the buses during rush hour
When I grasp and gasp my sympathy for them.
They roll in the wash cycle with the chaos of the office
As I try to scrub the computer input errors out.
Soap cleans errors better than paper.
The clothes spin in rinse, as I watch the bar people at night
Spin to and from each other, with whirling vibes of manipulation,
Bitchery and bastardy until their real selves are as unseeable as the whirling cloth pieces.
Heartbreak stains will stay on the uncleansed, uncleansable souls.
My pinned-together socks, like man-woman couplings in our
Age of light-year speed transition, apart will be torn.
Handkerchiefs, like Golden Gate Bridge jumpers,
Will drown themselves in the graveyard of the waterwork’s pipe system.
The water overflows from the tap like frustration-energy vibrating at Group Therapy,
And sinks through the grated holes like bar-bathroom alcoholized urine.
I wonder, does God pace the universe? And say
“When I do my damage on the final day of judgment,
I will not be convicted by a jury of dogs.”
The beat of the throbbing radio springs and ricochets like
Pistons move the auto’s wheels but no deals
Two not one, deal and compromise
Unless two be in one me; like the television and radio
Smothering and mothering my outside-battlefront-to-inside-headquarters reality
Unperceptive senses through to my parent programmed computer brain
Spewing out junk and sheets of confusion as my
Mouth spews out cigarette smoke (symbolizing the haze in my heart which
Lies in my Coca-cola addicted fuel-tank stomach)
Which compels and electroschocks
My robot-body to release the window open
But unreleased my soul and humanness
And I wait patiently for a
Human, not artificial, what (not love) unknowable satisfaction because
Love is a sentimental song or a blurry oneupmanship for hope that,
But for someone to touch me and again to break my
Rotating cylinders and make me an inheritor of
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