All you liberal arts, English major types might enjoy this. It’s a poem I wrote after staring at my closet one day and having verses from a couple of poems flit into my mind.
A Poetry Lover Confronts Her Closet
About clutter I was never wrong.
And had I but world enough and time, I might have more.
Clutter to the left of me, clutter to the right of me,
But clutter is junk and junk clutter. That is all I know on earth and all I need to know.
Today we have the purging of clothes.
Oh shorts, thou art stained—no grandeur in these dappled things.
Ignorant stray socks have clashed too long by night,
And your gossamer threads caught somewhere, oh my tights.
I’m martyr to a surplus all my own.
The apparition of these t-shirts in a pile
Is too much with me and lays waste my floor.
There is no going gentle into that top drawer.
Two earrings diverged on an unknown trip.
One with somewhere to go sailed calmly on.
Safe in its alabaster chamber, its mate’s forlorn.
Nevermore, I quote the raven, to be worn.
Here are some pants against which I have no official complaint.
But will there be time? Will there be time
To arise and go, and go to Hems R We
Because rolled bottoms are too old for me?
I real cool.
I shopping fool.
Beware the credit card, my son—
Since feeling is first, we want no dream deferred.
Getting and spending in ah!—bright hopes,
Little we see in paychecks that is ours.
Shall I compare thee to what so much depends upon?
The chill, then stupor, then the letting go.
Or perhaps that is not what I meant at all.
Perhaps that is not it at all.