I Hate This Day Already
an ode to autumn
suze allen 9.22.22
I hate this day already.
I hated it the night before.
The rain is a determined Mariachi Band on the metal roof.
You never ask for them to show up but here they come interrupting your supper and handing you a rose
And looking for a fiver of appreciation.
The skies are dark at 9am like the earth forgot the day and went right to night.
The inside of this camper home is damp and uninspiring
for anything but this angsty poem
The smell of this morose Thursday is stiflingly dank, wet towelesque topped by a hint of mold and rotting wood.
Dead leaves and Blooming fungi litter the landscape and trees shed their leaves before even coloring up. Autumn is official today.
A depressing trill of thunder underscores its entrance.
My melancholy scritchy mood flops me about
A half assed attempt to face the day
Make the Italian roast and approach living
When all I want to do is watch crime dramas in bed
with ear buds so the rain timpani will shut the fuck up.
I did not sleep last night
not a jot or a tittle. Biblical insomnia.
My heavy eyelids scrape over my gritty bloodshot balls.
The whirr of the electric water pot promises coffee
if I can find it in me to fit the brown paper filter into the ceramic filter
fill it with grounds and pour hot water until the thermal carafe is full.
I do it but I am not in the mood.
Coffee for one. Again. Boo Hoo.
I throw a pity party for a party of one.
Have a hissy fit. Throw a tantrum at the isolation within these woods.
Who cares? But I say the words loud – out loud
competing with the cacophony of showers over my head
in my head.
I do not want to find purpose,
do the thing I am supposed to.
Make the calls. Pack the boxes. Haul shit to Goodwill again. Wrap it up.
Close the tinny door
and drive off this historical burial site
where my family of origin went off the rails.
I doubt myself.
Why am I moving this half house of stale happiness and alcohol-soaked anguish; wheeling it off the spot of land it spent decades desecrating?
Because I said so. I think so. I.
What the fuckety fuck?
I am old now. Well older. 60.
So, I clutch this humble moving feast, now more like a dull repast of basic survival
and wonder how the fuck did I get here?
But I know.
I have the folded map, ripped at the overworn creases.
And I see the highlighted trails we took
All of us.
The family,
mostly dead or dead to me.
Ambiguous grief, they call it. Huh. Pretty biguous to me.
I just call it a train wreck that I got to walk away from.
Does that make me some kind of winner?
I think not.
Shut the fuck up, I scream to Mother Nature.
I should just walk in the deluge. Soak myself to the bone. Wash away my sorrow. I’d have to be out there for days. I might, though.
I stand at the duct taped screen door.
Shit it is miserable out there.
Even my dog does not want to go outside to do her business on the spongy ground bespeckled with muddy brown puddles.
So, she holds it. Holds something that is necessary to get out, in.
I feel her.
But eventually she’ll have to. As I couldn’t pass this day without this poem and coffee off white with half and half.
I don’t hate this day any less though.
Yes, I have decided to hate it until it is over. Make me not.
Not every day is a winner.
The Mariachi rain turns into taiko drumming.
9:05 am
The dark roast slides down my throat by rote
No zing to it, no flip switching except for the underwhelming lightning
that now joins the thunder as I tell myself that no one evolves from under the covers. The lightning and I better get cracking, or we will go down unseen thus defeated
And who would care?
I step into the rain daring it to wash me clean.
It is quieter out here.
No jarring metal to pound against. Just open sky.
And maybe that’s the trick.
The dog joins me.
We’re taking care of business in one way or another.
Suffering comes from saying things shouldn’t be this way.
At least that’s what the Buddha says. How should I know?
I am way under enlightened.
But I’m up and I am out in the day that I hate, and time is turning its gaze towards the afternoon.
What’s next?
More of the same tomorrow.
More of the same.