Be so fractioned
my split personality be split
Never know who's comin' out
Kinda like the laundry mat
Does mine at the Wishy Washy

Funny how things get all separated
Whites all in a pile over here
Darks and colors over there
Breaks it down even further

Gotta lotta red
so that gets its own pile
whilst medium and light colors
be divided

Blacks and blues
just lumped together
Then it just gets all mixed up again

'Cause truth is
don't gots the dough to through
down that many loads

This riles Señorita Clarita
Thinks I'm cheap
so mostly, I end up lookin' like some
techno tie-dyed fruit basket
in girly pants

Yeah, still be wearin'
my sister's hand-me-downs
Be some hard times for
The Poet Launderette

you and me
is not reality
and its getting
slipping
away from me
i'm just a trick
your mirrors and smoke
bring me a schwarma platter
and a diet coke
if i am nothing and
never have been
then how come
when you do my laundry
you get your vs
and my dress shirts
all mixed in??

I can tell I'm depressed
When I don't take the laundry
Out of the washer,
Where it has been cleansed of its sins
Of passion, or rage, of greasy fast food.
My filthy hands would ruin them.


So I wait for my roommate
To baptize his own spotless hands
With MY damp boxers.
The habitual thuds of my soggy clothes
Against the back of the dryer
Are a nice distraction.

My favorite flannel dances
With her tiny lost sock.
But 45 minutes isn't enough.
I don't want to end their fun,
So I leave them there
And hope that they'll fuse forever.

He tosses the clothes onto my floor,
Scattering them, wrinkling them, freeing them.
Corduroys atop henleys under crew socks and tees.
Folding them would be a waste
Of a catastrophic masterpiece.

What if smells a lot like vanilla
But not like scented candle vanilla
And not like perfume vanilla
But like liquid air freshener vanilla that you’ve had in your drawer for two years and didn’t have enough left in the bottle to use the spray top so you unscrewed the lid and splashed it all over your sheets
Let it dry
Waited two days
Then invited a pretty girl over
Let her sleep in your bed
Had ***
Dreamt of forever
Took a shower
Laid back in your bed
Let her go
And then slept face down on the pillow you let her use while reading text messages about how she won’t be able to keep seeing you any more
You know, that kind of vanilla

It's the perfect,
soothing,
excuse.

Warm, fragrant,
and necessary.

What else
could so
effectively
keep me
from my
writing?

Now,
there's
just mine
to do,
and I'm
out of
excuses.

in my mother's basement
once upon a time she ******* a clothes line
though most of the time
the line
was used to hang up
hangers
precariously hooked to a rope becoming less taut
as the years go on

the paradox of garage sale hand-me-downs of broken homes
as bodies for clothes become subtracted they make room for memories
we grow heavier by
as the hangers continue to multiply unused
clothes hangers are sacred
they are ghost as zygotes

back then there were days
I would wear my woven leather belt for an inverted neck tie
on those days
tie the other end to the wooden cross supports in the basement ceiling
then tip-toeing up
on a beat-up old stool
play chicken
a game of chicken with nobody
a side of extra mc chicken sauce for the soul

I wonder now
how if anyone would've wondered
if I had died never really learning how to wear a belt
or how to properly tie a neck-tie
kids today wear their pants too low
and parents back then were way too given to involuntary penance

to up the ante
I would write a list on the wooden beams in the ceiling
each time I got up there
for all the reasons I got up there
in attempt to embellish the exit sign
singing ugly duckling swan song echo
sedated by the attempt
training wheels for Icarus syndrome

it wasn't that my youth was in disillusion
I just never really learned how to measure distance properly
a pair of breaking parents
an unwanted pregnancy
"What's with in arms' reach?"
a game of catch
a game of release
a flight of stairs in one step
"it's not your fault kid
but you're gonna have to get hurt anyway"

funny how when you are teetering on stoic infinity
balanced like an idle pendulum
a noose becomes a life-support system
dance like no one is watching

I don't play those games anymore
my bones have gotten too heavy to bet against
memories I still wish to change
knees too weighted to two-step the precipice
on weekends

and since practicing how to use my legs again
and again
I now prefer walking this earth
wearing my belt around my equator
over drawstrings around my neck

the basement has since been renovated
no more wooden crosses
exposed in the ceiling
I don't play childish games anymore
I just do my laundry there

In a little pile by the bathroom,
a collection of my clothing engraved.
Though the cloth is cyclically exchanged,
the pile serves as vowed remain.
I say I keep them there in case,
but we both know it's promised trace
that any time I leave this place
there is a never-ending return.

Bent over the stream
of laundrywomen drench
words that flitter to and fro,
rinsing and revising spoken prose
across whispered conversations

Fading away into the piercing gaze
of an endless summer’s haze
the laundrywomen have mastered
the art of washing the soul with only water
and well-meant poems as soap
as if it were the cloth in their hands