Chlorine

Green pill
Blue pill
Red pill
Which is the cure?
Which will finally render me
Graceful and demure?

The gears in my brain
Groan and grind
Turn and burn
Little engines pushing me
Forward, downward, backward
Upward, leftward, wrongward
But where is the right?
What is the right?
Am I right?
Am I?

Fresh tar on the street
Next to the other street
Which is old and bumpy
I see the cracks
Spiderwebs running through
Reminds me of the corpse
Of my dear old Nan
Smoked all those Reds
Now her skin is turning blue
She's become a lovely stew
For the dirt and trees
And I see now, finally how
This new street
Soon to be old
Must certainly be
None other than me
Myself alone

What a fuss
Dear old mother likes to make
Always told me what roads to take
She never could see
That they all led to the same place
Still I wish that she'd been right
But Time's hardening always strikes
And her heartening stories
Grow tiresome, trite

Today my soul is maintained
A man in a white worksuit
Checks the chlorine levels
Scoops out the fallen leaves
And once helped rid me of
A poor drowned mouse
Whose heart I never knew
Who so briefly dared
To make ripples in the blue

The man in the white worksuit is pleased
Because dangerous levels
Harmful bacteria
All gone-
He tells me
The restless waters of my soul, someday
Will be calm and clean