Domestic Quietude

Domestic Quietude
© Surazeus
2025 01 17

So many apples have fallen on the ground 
that Janet thinks grim angels on gold clouds 
want to litter her dead garden on purpose 
to shame her into tending to wild herbs, 
but she prefers to lounge on the torn couch 
and watch television shows while she smokes. 

Not liking where her story seems to go, 
Janet tosses the still-glowing cigarette 
on the couch to set the dead house on fire, 
then walks along the busy market road 
where some old world-famous rock and roll band 
plays their last concert on the building roof. 

Standing alone on the twelfth-century bridge 
by the fountain where rocking horses rot, 
Janet tries to picture herself in a boat 
on the river polluted with foul trash, 
but decides to pick strawberries instead 
till the old man threatens he with his gun. 

Shuffling stiffly because her legs are sore, 
Janet walks in twilight of eerie skies 
to the Crippled Horse Pub down by the river 
where university professors and hippies 
drink beer and recite solemn poetry 
to defy weird modernist tendencies. 

Half-drunk in bleary candlelight of lust, 
Janet drapes her arms around Lucky Jim 
and whispers loudly in his hairy ear, 
"I want to have the most lurid affair 
with you while your wife is home baking cakes," 
but kisses his book instead of his cheek. 

Clutching ream of paper in glow of dawn 
that stripes bloody wounds of hope on wet grass, 
Janet decides she will write the best novel 
about comic sorrow of motherhood 
when the baby dies of fever at midnight 
because she fell asleep from sad exhaustion. 

Slouching at old oak wood desk by the window, 
cracked by the rock she threw when she was ten, 
Janet writes ragged lines of poetry 
to express psychotic epiphany 
of domestic quietude, which confounds 
her sadness that Heaven is her delusion. 

Clutching mic pole in the Crippled Horse Pub, 
Janet reads poetry of worthless hope 
about how she caused her baby to die 
because she is Worst Mother in the world, 
then cries when all the professors and hippies 
praise her poems and ask her out on dates.