Square One of Chutes & Ladders (single life after thirty)
~~~
For Tina
the game rules wink & explain that should one
(minimum number of players *1!)
land on a chute, the non-trivial risk of returning to square one was no risk at all but just a fresh direct chance, a new roll of the dice,
a please-do-start-all over, a 2nd maybe to the power of infinity,
quite the accurate inaccuracy, this curse of the slip & fall treadmill
and you're hot smart and hot good looking with a good job,
but the chutes keep on sliding you back to square one,
and the revolutionary trips of over and over again are not
revolutionary at all, voluntary or fun but so *** unfunny, *** emoji-teared smeared, for real ones no longer bother to appear even when you bang your head on kitchen table
the suitor list lengthens even as it grows more abbreviated,
for the longest running one-act play in Manhattan seems to have no dearth of duplicative Stepford men willing to he-be a walk-on, stand-in, stand-by, understudies who want to be on top for one night only, take your applause, your easy-going unguarded openness, run their lines to find the way in to a garden where the fruits never ripen and never fully sweeten, and you can grimace-smile from the familiar **** flavor of resignation, one hand clapping-applauding yourself in your Emmy Best Unsupporting Actress weekend role of a
Stepford Wife
deception, repeating misperceptions and the wrist slitting frustration of the god, how boring is the game playing, and you think
let me rip, me, rip the rule book up, go live in Spain,
with no plans in hand, learn to drive stick shift and accidentally meet a really good looking man at a roadside cafe whose gentility rocks me in away that I had forgotten was humanly possible and who loves to salsa and speaks to me through dance even though we don't speak a common language, just an uncommon one, then your subway stop arrives and the summer heat seems ever worse
Thursday night is dating website visitation scheduled and sometimes one cannot recall the password, thinking it's
of of these:
shampoo^ rinse repeat
friends cluck sympathetically but cannot locate a decent boyfriend's friend and this chute **** exhausts from numbing familiarity and a plot that never thickens in a city where the emphasis is on the endless, of endless possibilities
and what you fear is not being sad, when the game roll lands you on a chute, winking time to start over, but that the effervesced heat of a new hopeful start is overcome and 'why bother' is the whisper you have been ignoring and only love is just a poem, not a real thing, even though you are the single player, the game wins when you quit
but the 1% chance leads you back to the start, for though
the lottery odds are ridiculous but does not every week
someone else wins at Chutes and Ladders*
4:03am 6/17/17
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Chutes_and_Ladders
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stepford_Wives
^"gonna shampoo that man right out of my hair" South Pacific musical