VINDICATION

Let them twitter and wag their tongues 

Until they’re loose in their heads 

The neighbors.

I care. Not.

I’m raking the rocks, 

and sweeping them with a broom.

I have a plan, which is to bare naked

the homely ground.

The satisfaction that comes from

banishing billions of pieces of gravel

into a bucket so the grass will grow

is quasi-orgasmic.

Speaking of which, I'm not dressed, 

at least, not properly --

I slept in these bottoms, 

pajamas tucked in boots, which

I’m wearing in the dead of summer

Let them twitter at that too.

I hate hate, but what do you do

with neighbors like this, before whom

you can’t rake rocks in your pj's 

in the summer in acrid arctic boots

with your hellish hair filthy and deranged?

You want the yard to look nicer than you do

although you feel the shame they must feel

in having to look at either, but anyway

you just keep raking and sweeping 

until the ground is smooth, and there -- there! 

You see a struggling blade, and there, 

another! -- and you’ve been vindicated,

out there wrestling like some mad witch

with a bushed bedraggled broom

sweating like a a horde of hogs,

pecking and poking at infinities of cosmic rock

ecstatically unearthing secrets

the neighbors aren’t fit to hear.

Copyright Julianza Shavin 2003