So the Landlord Took out the Bath and Put in a Glass Shower By Dawn Wilson

You always say you would never kill yourself, but I know better because I have seen you do it. You’re a liar and a vagrant.

I like that. You’re fragile.

The lies are insulation.

You can’t stand what most people crave. They obsess. You cringe. Whoop de doo! Or scream wail snot, but I can’t make it stop just because you want off.

Most people call it culture — hi-de-ho, tip a hat, pass on the right, celebrity gossip . . . online friends, television snobs, lawn service jobs, and formaldehyde . . . quick quick sloowww . . . leases, fleeces, lice, three mice . . . smile and nod, curiosity’s cat, wave curtsy stoop and pluck dig fuck — and once they learn the rules, they don’t question the Big Blue Ox.

Your soapbox: Life’s a mistake, crafted from a lie. That line in the sand leads back two hundred years to a typo, a misunderstanding, a joke that everyone shrugged “Oh Well” and just went with. Now it’s The Way, The Truth, The Light. To the blind beggar bumpkins, shit they’re dumb, but I don’t care. Like I say, if that’s not fact, what is? You deny it, but shouldn’t isn’t is and is definitely isn’t shoulda — Don’t. No. Please. — and woulda/wouldn’t/couldn’t is just too damn conditional for a speck of blood or anything real, and that’s when you broke the curtain rod just tying the rope to it.

I didn’t say you shouldn’t do what you always said you wouldn’t, ‘cause the fact is, it was something you were doing, and I could watch.

© 2013 Dawn Wilson

Dawn Wilson dabbles inside the (relatively) dark forest of kitsch, surrealism, and espièglerie while wearing various pieces of the kitchen silverware.  A graduate of the Bath Spa University MA in Creative Writing in Bath, England, she is at work on a madcap novel.  Her work is forthcoming in Liquid Imagination, and has already appeared in Rabbit Catastrophe Review, Shoots, Some of Its Parts, and Dr. Hurley’s Snake Oil Cure.  You can find her at nightdawn.wordpress.com

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