Ivanova

It was the peppermint truth that bowled me over
as my landlady excused herself and trod from
my apartment following a conversation on the
very nature of rent, and if it is not due how it
still exists and still temporally requires a man
to formerly recognize its concept, regardless of
past biases and wasted chunks of slack-earned
dollars that drowned in the florid reverie of
impartially flatlined alcoholism and reeked as
bitter as my tongue as it darted from lip to lip
as cavern to cavern, her speech pelting madness
through ears that listened more to blood
and to acid, but not verbals and gerunds, the skill
that she forgot existed in place of the rent, which
drove her pulse and gripped her neck, waking in
the middle of the night from the drip of a
rotted ceiling of vaulted arches and stale frescoes
of nineteenth century architecture, wondering who
has paid the rent and where her husband’s spirit
was and if he had to pay the rent to Charon, or the
shack on the river styx and a truth unbidden
to all corpses and button-strung eyes and miniscule
corduroy vests that children love to pin on
dolls that flay around and compel straw-headed
imbeciles to strike up the written word and become
poets, classified as more than men when really
it’s an underclass of subjectivity to forgo punctuation
and dawdle about in the sometimes forged and altogether
unoriginal thoughts that peddle near the dreams
that float above the hay-colored hair
as they doze off in night-time wanderings
through wheat and crops
and never wonder what the rent is
or that one day it will be the spike in the eye
that drags them to work
and siphons their dreams
into red plastic cups
and everything burns
in potato juice
just as it should
and just as it will