watching marshmallow
take a monstrous morning shit
in the barren flower bed outside my window
as his owner shouts into her phone
i think at least the two of them are consistent
unlike poetry or hot water in this place
they are like death and taxes
i never liked marshmallow, even as a pup
the kind of terrier mix you make big u-shapes around
with an insidious bark and that awful name
cooed at during periwinkle stretches
of the most ungodly of morning hours
the way his excrement stench wafts into the apartment
along with his owner’s cigarette smoke
along with the bleating, nasal pace
of her inane and desperate conversations
but still i stand there, hidden by navy blue curtains,
watching the dog do his business
like i’m viewing some sort of alien ritual
like an old man with nothing better on his agenda
than to spend his fleeting hours sitting in a laundromat
never understanding why i don’t get things done
as ms. owner stubs out another ciggie
suggests that someone on the other line bite her
the two of us mesmerized by marshmallow’s
big fat turd steaming in the march cold
fertilizing nothing by the frozen dirt and weeds
and the last line of another mediocre poem.
03.07.16
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