Alright so if you walk in to my bedroom Pressed in the far corner is my bed The headboard against the left wall And, if you’re lying in it, the left side against an interior wall of the house On that wall, the one on the left side of the bed, is a painting that came with the house It is a long rectangle I would describe its artistic value to be Obligatory-Motel-Room-Painting Blocks of color and weird squiggly bits Not a picture of anything as much as a tool to bring the end table and the drapes together with the sheets It’s on canvas stretched around a wooden frame Nailed into the top bar of that wooden frame, dead center, is a jagged piece of metal Normally you’d just put a nail in the wall and center that bit on the nail there you go But this house has those paper thin walls that a nail with an ant on would tear through like Robin Hood sliding down a royal banner out a castle window with Maid Marion under his arm So you can’t just hang the painting on the wall But the room has crown molding So instead of a nail in the wall There is a string tied to the jagged piece of metal that extends up the center of the wall to the top Where the string is tied to a fishing hook that is clipped into the crown molding
All this is to say is that sometimes when I lie in bed alone in my thoughts or otherwise I reach my hand up and push the painting Like a brother in the backseat being told not to touch his little sister I just kind of give it a poke And I watch it swing from side to side Or rather I expect to watch it swing like a marble on a string in a pendulum prop at a CEO’s desk Side to side Evenly But it doesn’t It wobbles while it sways Like how at Disneyland The Tea Cup Ride The cups spin in circles while they go in circles The painting wobbles while it sways back and forth And I just don’t get it Like I don’t understand at all See I’m a smart conceited man so this gets on my nerves And I know that if I spent my junior year of high school, first trimester, third period paying attention to Mrs. Whatever’s physics class instead of eating turkey sandwiches in the back with Sean then falling asleep that I’d be able to tell you exactly why this happens But I got hungry at like 9am back then and I can’t help that I didn’t give a **** so I can’t explain it
And all of that was to say that I spend most of my daily energy trying to feel normal Trying to be a sane person Waking up all five days of the work week on time Showering and brushing my teeth Taking my kid to school and not forgetting to pick him back up after work Not taking shots on my lunch breaks And we all have the internet And we all like poetry So we’ve all heard the phrase “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting diff…and you know where I’m going I’ve been in therapy since I was eight Been on all the medications Kept myself alive even when I didn’t want to Worked a job long enough to get promoted a couple times Live a real life, with real consequences And every once in a while if I’m not looking too hard I start to feel like a normal Like a sane person Like someone who is of his right mind And then all of it gets undone by a ****** painting hanging on a string in my bedroom Because I know what it means about me to push that painting and expect it swing every time and to every time watch in shock as it wobbles while it sways
A collection of poems by me is available on Amazon Where She Left Me - Michael DeVoe