The weather: it was warm, then it got a little warmer, and finally the warmth sprouted wings and wept. Wept on the seven eight-foot resin tables and two forty-eight-inch rounds set up early. Wept on the cardinal directions and informational placards. Wept on the nose of my face and caused me to feel suspiciously deflated. I say suspicious because I suspect I was weeping too and did not want to inconvenience anyone. Like a shiny balloon from a wedding last weekend carried all over the city by a low-pressure system, I stack chairs and pull carts across uneven considerations of brickwork. I snip twine wrapping peonies to the bars of a gabled arbor. Look at me or don’t as I crush this bag of stale chips beneath the burden of a wheelbarrow. Waste time gorgeously. Be blissful before being sad before being worried and standing still. I wish I could fix all of it. The angle of three-hundred chairs arranged in thirty rows of ten. That one blinking bulb on that one strand of warm-white lights in that one alcove on that one railing that one can cling to when one ascends, descends, never seeming to stop no matter how many times I twist and untwist it. Where weeds once were: empty lines. Burnt peppercorn and blacktop. Ashes of clover, quackgrass, speedwell. My forlorn brain-body failing to predict the future.

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I wrote a lot of poems while working as a janitor a few years back. I never shared any because I figured people would find it boring or pandering that I was poeticizing my "job" or something. Like most things I think, as time has gone on, it seems unfounded.

Sure, some are stinkers; but in others, like this one, the tension and pressure I was putting on myself post- grad school to "write" butts up against the concept of "employment" and kind of wanting to disappear into something where the expectations I was used to were non-existent ("different" is probably a better word) and this rings as still relevant to where I am in life, where I will be, where I hope to be going.