Eureka!

Neat people never make the kind of interesting discoveries that I do.
O I see them, with their ties and pocket protectors and shirts tucked,
natty as dish towels hung evenly and precisely on the oven door.
Yet what do they discover, hmmm?  Some new polypeptide
chain, or some new super glue, or perhaps an emulsifier
to dissolve that stubborn wax in the ears.
Neat they are, and with the patience
of shirt pins, yet boring are
their discoveries.

I long ago discovered the correlation
between interesting discoveries and messiness,
that there’s a kind of cosmic selection between fascinating
eureka moments, those moments of pure, “Aha!  and abject slobbery.
It’s much like when Charles Goodyear spilled a rubber mixture
on a hot stove and witnessed, for the first time, vulcanization. 
Not that he was a slob, mind you, but that he was not
so anal to demand of himself the sterile neatness
that would preclude the fortune of
serendipity co-mingling with luck
waiting in the hallway.

I have discovered
desultory imps, exquisite rascals,
pseudo-beings with golden ears and silver hair
as newspaper remained scattered all over the living room
and with tube socks draped like slain rats on the arm of the love seat.

Neat nudges off, with mannish hands, compliant revelation;
it lances like a fencer akimbo the willingness to be found.
Intriguing discoveries are born from disarray, when beds
are unmade, when lampshades are angled, when pillows
and silverware squat on the estate of diligent put away.
Great fortune it has been, for me, to have found finery
and rainbows, that which is crosshairs for gun sights,
that which arises out of anti-neat to stand bold and
keen, like fuchsia canoes in the folds of dryer lint.

34 Lines
Writer’s Cramp
February 22, 2014

(Sometimes it's a kick to write a piece which is pretty much
the exact opposite of one's reality...although there are times.)