Overthought And After Deadline

It was only a matter of time before this project went meta. Seventeen days, to be exact. Jeffrey McDaniel's The Splinter Factory is one of my favorite collections to read and reread. This time, I read it front to back on a bus trip and then went back and siphoned out my favorite lines to structure a conversation around I hadn't intended said conversation to be about why I'd missed some deadlines in this project, but that's what ended up happening.

As is the norm, any text in black was written by me, italicized blue text is from Jeffrey McDaniel's book.

The title of this poem is also from a line by McDaniel, in which he describes how one goes crazy.

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One Marble At A Time

​I promised myself I'd read a book of poetry a day
                                 the way I promised my mother I'd call once a week
                                 the way I promised I'd get my homework done
                                 the way I promised I'd tell
                                                                                   whoever it was that year
                                                                                   how I felt about them
                                 the way I promised I'd eat better
                                                                      I'd start running
                                                                      I'd drink less soda
                                                                      I'd forgive
                                                                                          whoever it was that year
                                 the way a kitten promises frolic
                                 the way a bus schedule promises ibuprofen
                                 the way a road trip promises silence

When I am confronted by the screeching car alarm of a deadline
            I get so lost in the hideous intoxication of the honk
                                       how you can tell in what year they bought that useless alarm
                                                                       based on how familiar the rhythm
                                                you and all your neighbors deliberately ignore
            I get so lost that I forget it's supposed to signal urgency

I broke my word so many times, it became
a handful of crumbs I sprinkled at my father's ankles

whenever I needed money.

It's so easy to dress my parents in all of my failures
not because my father didn't remember my birthday enough
or my mother never forgets to carry my most embarrassing
                                                                            childhood experiences in her purse
but because they spent so much of my teenage years
trying on my blame in the department store mirrors of my eyes
that it's difficult to imagine them without it

Every time I have dinner with a parent
they drop a hundred on my plate until
I sing the misery of their ex-spouse

I'm the canary watching multiple coal mines via Skype

Each of them twenty years removed from shared bank accounts
Forty-five years removed from a ring and a question
neither of them budgeted for

I wonder how that question gets popped. Is it like a bottle

of expensive champagne, or a big, ugly, zit
that won't go away?

My mother has never once not ever forgotten even a single time to
ask who I am seeing

I always say a therapist and thank her for asking

But I can't see therapists the way dogs can't see color
In that they can see color
but differently than humans and
have no way of expressing how they see

My mother never laughs
at this joke of my solitude
but always offers to pay for my next meal

She always predicts what her husband will order
because he is not so much a creature of habit as
                          a varmint of obsession
When I eat with them I am expected to still be
seventeen and growing in every way but diet

Instead of salt

and pepper, I'd like a think layer of antique
store dust enthusiastically sprinkled on

the lettuce, so halfway through the sandwich,
a wave of nostalgia will wash over me

If it isn't my parents' fault that I am less behind and more
                                                                    rolling beneath deadlines of my own design
then
​can I blame desire

How I could read a recipe book for inspiration and
spend the rest of the night tasting a stranger
determined to know the precise ratio of ingredients that led him to
                                       the awkward of us

I mean, isn't it odd—how you can buy a lap dance,
phone sex, or blow job in a snap, but can't

pay a person a dollar just to sit next to you
on a park bench and simply hold your hand?

Oh, I've been down that road before.
In fact, I still have property there

So let's pretend my commitment issues and my love have never
accidentally sat down across from each other on a train
and spent the entire trip
pretending they're strangers

Let's say I miss deadlines like they are highway exits
and I'm not driving but I am distracting the driver

Let's say I miss deadlines like they stop calling me
and I don't want them to think I need them any more
than they need me so I don't call them either

Let's say I miss deadlines like
the only way I can communicate with my responsibilities is via Ouija board or
                                                                                                                      speculative fiction

Let's say I am so Over deadlines

But that's not in the cards. Heck, it's not even in the casino.

I often feel I'm not emotionally invested in anything to miss it
Deadlines sure and sometimes people also but money when
I'm broke love
when I'm alone That nostalgia sprinkled on a sandwich
is to impress you
I can't even taste it