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Poems My Rat Didn't Eat

by Thadra Sheridan

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1.
Dear Significant Other..... I’m sorry. Did I say that? You’re probably freaked out already; clutching your balls and checkbook for dear life, closing the shades and changing your phone number until this whole thing blows over. I should rephrase that. I didn’t mean “significant” in the sense that I wear your letter jacket and send Christmas cards to your parents and TATTOO YOUR NAME ON MY ASS No I just mean you are significant enough to be this poem, and although you’re really a generalized concept that could apply to any number of men in my past, I have you specifically in mind, and “Dear fill in the blank with the appropriate fling attention grabber flavor of the month latest thing last man I slept with” isn’t as poetic, so: Dear Significant Other..... You have completely occupied every waking moment of every thought that flits through my TORTURED BRAIN since you left town, which I knew would happen, and if I hadn’t have been so FUCKING DRUNK, I never would have slept with you on the first date! And even though my cat is dying, and my bathroom ceiling collapsed, that just means I think of YOU all the time and maybe sometimes my dying cat. Dear You.... Dear....Guy.... Dear Mr..... STUFF: How I love those careless black ringlets that cascade around your eyes. GOD If you only knew what a weakness I have for hair exactly like that. I love the pile of poetry books you left as a parting gift, with personalized inscriptions I already picked apart into CRYPTIC SECRET LOVE MESSAGES TO ME You see... I have this thing, this problem, where I’m emotionally incapable of meaningless casual sex, because four days later, you haven’t left my brain for ONE BLESSED MOMENT OF PEACE And that’s really a disproportional amount of time to justify one night’s activity, and at thirty, I have identified five test signs in men to foreshadow romantic doom; all of which YOU PASSED. There is no glimmer of hope I am aware of. OH MY GOD, You are making me end sentences with prepositions! I have a dying cat, A career that takes constant vigilance, a crippling load of debt to be dealt with, and I have checked my e-mail seven times today, just in case you’d written. And even though you gave me that weird hug goodbye that did not involve your shoulders, I’m running scenarios through my mind that you’re waiting the appropriate four days to call and confess your adoration, or you’ll show up at my door later, because you haven’t stopped thinking about me for a second. I’m not saying this is the Greatest Love the World has Ever Known. I’m not picking out china patterns or practicing my name as “Mrs. Significant.” I’m simply grasping for any shred of evidence to keep me from feeling so CHEAP and situational. Extenuating chemical circumstances aside, my complete lack of faith in or expectations from any member of the male species BE DAMNED. Significant, my dear, I am a sad and lonely woman who doesn’t trust, and rarely loves. But you caught my attention so hard and fast, I lost my mind for one foolish night. But even if I’d been stone cold sober, I would have been VERY, VERY TEMPTED, because in several months of poetry and flirtatious conversations, I had assembled the notion that you are intelligent, clever, romantic, fascinating, and hilarious. This might have really been something. But I did it again; Got all ahead of myself, Gave you an advance at a low low price all WRAPPED UP IN SHINY DEPARTMENT STORE PAPER And now I’m eating myself alive with this neurotic compulsive frenzied ridiculous obsessive pathetic regret.
2.
Monday through Friday 5:50 am, they assemble in the parking lot of my diner. Always chilly at that hour, they huddle in idling cars, monitor watches and stereo clocks until 6 am open. Sometimes, if I wait ‘til a few minutes past, they form an impatient line, shifting from foot to foot outside the door. Once I unlock it from the inside, they shuffle in to take the same chairs at the same tables they’ve perched Monday through Friday since the dawn of time. I don’t have to ask any more, just rattle off their orders as a formality. Bob at the lunch counter: oatmeal, no raisins, coffee, cinnamon toast, George in non-smoking: cheddar omelette, no toast, earl grey tea, five in smoking with separate tables and one conversation: well-done waffle with bananas, raisin bran with skim and half a grapefruit. Midge takes the center four top; Always the back left chair, always coffee and dry toast with four butter pats and two honeys. She leaves a neat stack of six dimes every day. If her table has been slightly moved, if I give her three butters, instead of four she will comment. These are real breakfasts but not real names. I’m not protecting the innocent, it’s just mostly I call them whatshisname and whatsherface and that idiot who throws quarters at me, because there’s only so much I’m willing to do for a stack of six dimes, and remembering your name crosses that line. Friday morning an isolated trap door to the bowels of hell opens directly beneath the back left chair at the center four top. It sucks Midge down to eternal damnation. That wouldn’t have happened if she’d sat in the chair on the right that day. And I laugh at her receding frame for every time she waved me down frantically to add a tablespoon of coffee to her nearly-full cup, because the fact that I’m the only person here to cover twenty-three impatient, demanding regulars just doesn’t factor in to her tiny coffee, dry toast, four butter, two honey mind. She needs unwavering routine: same time standard chair regular waitress typical room temperature “Good morning” cup of coffee glass of ice water rolled silverware and napkin delivered promptly usual breakfast paid for in exact change, leaving six dimes piled neatly. Unfortunately the regular girl is on vacation this month. And she fits nicely into this vortex, but I can’t eat leftovers the very next day. I assemble twenty freelance checks a month and wait tables from time to time, because with nine to five under fluorescents I wouldn’t need a trapdoor to hell. Al comes in around ten; bagel sandwich with pepper jack seven days a week. He says some people need their routine to maintain stability. What the hell’s so great about stability? I’m rather fond of my What’s going to happen tomorrow. And if one day some little whippersnapper calls me Midge, because she refuses to learn my stupid name, although she could set her watch by my chronic meticulous morning ritual, I’ll take a blindfold, a cigarette, and six to the frontal lobe, because I’d rather check out early in a blaze of maudlin movie western parody than grow steady mold and apathy in purgatory.
3.
Memo: from the Corporate American Film Commission, regarding standard practices for successful blockbuster film The commission has issued the following guidelines and specifications to assist prospective filmmakers in creating a BOX OFFICE SMASH: Villains are encouraged to be vaguely foreign, with some unplaceable accent, or representing past enemies or known violent groups, like Germany, or the Irish Republican Army. Be cautious not to offend anyone specific. Be creative; try a radical faction of a militant organization. Or, if all else fails, use a Middle Eastern bad guy. This is always acceptable. Corporate injustice, and corrupt politicians may be addressed only after a fifteen year statute of limitations has expired. This implies that things like that don’t happen any more. Civil Rights violations postdating 1969 are discouraged for the same above reason, although current foreign attrocities are always a cheery boost for the American public. Any film using any form of homosexual male affection will be labelled Lavendar Screen, which implies, SOFT GAY PORN! Any film using a Native American protagonist must be * a period piece, or * depict this character as a trusty faithful sidekick. When addressing other “ethnic” principles, adhere to the following guidelines: Asian: Martial Arts related, or exotic female love interest. Latino: Loveable comic relief, or smoldering male love interest. Any ethnic group not represented in the preceding list is not recognized by the Corporate American Film Commission. All male principle characters must have a devoted wife or girlfriend, or find one within the parameters of the film. Even if he is * extremely overworked * occupied with matters of profound national importance * a heavy drug user or criminal She must forgive him, and wait eagerly for his affection. Wives and girlfriends are forbidden to leave sympathetic male characters, unless they are immediately replaced with younger, hotter, more understanding women. We encourage * Machine gunfire to accompany extreme distruction of property, and massive death tolls. * Gigantic explosions as backgrounds to sillhouetted characters; - running in slow motion towards the camera or - walking, if they’re really cool * Graphic depiction of serial murder and rape We discourage * smart women who don’t show their boobs * male frontal nudity, and * criticism of Christianity Animated films are most successful when presenting * A tragic work of literature * Historic event, or * Common mythology Severely altered to include: * The above specified love interest, and * A happy ending Acceptable: * Corporate product plugs * All-nude strip joints * Women as trophy sex accessories to * Super Villains, and * National Lampoon jocks Unacceptable: * male prostitutes * abortion * bestiality * acne * main characters who smoke, and * overweight women under 35 Failure to adhere to the above specifications will earn your film the moniker of “Independant,” or “Alternative.” It will experience a limited screening in small movie houses, college campuses, and art galleries, or GO STRAIGHT TO VIDEO!
4.
Where is my Neil Cassady, my sandy-haired, blue-eyed Denver muse-prince; dancing under the tree tops, driving me from coast to coast, sucking the marrow from life and showing me how. Cassady, Someone was eating pistachios at the bus stop. I study empty shells, awaiting the 4B. In the movies lipstick never comes off on the edge of your cup, there’s always a parking spot right out front, and when he loves you he stands outside your bedroom window in the rain, blaring Peter Gabriel from the boom box he struggles to hold over his head. In real life he never broke up with his last girlfriend, and I’m his inadvertent unwilling mistress-experiment. In real life sweat makes my mascara run and someone keeps swiping my shampoo from the Y. I bare my arms, my belly, my back to the sun; weighing fashion against cancer. Sex makes me thirsty. Mangoes taste like gasoline. A day in the sunshine leaves me looking like W.C. Fields. By the time I like the way I look now, I’ll be sixty, looking at old pictures. I have this theory that the quality of a neighborhood is directly proportional to the amount of discarded shopping carts you find there. There’s been one in front of my building for a week. On sticky summer evenings I check my e-mail; mostly porn links and personality tests while the cat finds the highest spot in the apartment, which ends up being the top of the bathroom door. He just stands up there and wishes he was higher for a while. Past a quarter of a century I reassure myself there’s ample time left, but television distracts me from just about anything, and time keeps marching on. Nearing thirty, I find myself admiring the lifeguard at the Y, and the stock boy at the grocery store, and the new waiter at work, and I can’t remember libido ever nagging so loudly. When I was a kid I passed a whole afternoon riding the elevator in a 50 story building. I wish anything could entertain me like that now. I pass whole afternoons tapping a pen against my teeth and remembering the smell of crayons. Memories lick around the edges; fat yellow spider chrysanthemums, like shredded softballs on my godfather’s casket. I grind fresh coffee every morning and flip countless empty pages, wishing I was smarter and thinner and taller, but the ice cubes melt in my drink if I write in the sun, and ink gets all over my fingers. Cassady with your tedious, labored prose, I need your kind of inspiration. The prince never came back with my glass slipper. I never met my movie star. Life takes work I’m dwindling in a one-bedroom apartment with two cats and room in the basement for my bike.
5.
In real life, this sixteen year old boy snuck into the women’s shower at the Y. I, naked, covered in soap suds, he, in 3/4 length dark green winter coat, walked right up to me, stood two feet away, said, Hi, how’s it going? You can say, and someone did, heh heh...smart kid, implying they’d like to see me naked too, disregarding this fucking kid assaulted me in a place I pay $39 a month to stand naked and soapy, confident and unmolested,, until the day when he walked through frosted glass door with WOMEN ONLY prominently displayed in block black capital letters; leered me up and down, pricing meat at a butcher shop, smiled smugly, like he was incredibly clever and proud of his invasiveness, and spoke to me, like I was wearing clothes, and we were at a social mixer. To him I’m not a woman; a fellow human being. To him I’m a naked woman, which makes me a romanticized object to be ogled and tell your friends later. By now I probably arched my back, slicked long wet honey blond hair with both hands, displaying perfect size D lathered breasts. By now I smiled, slipped off his backpack, caressed his sporadic peach fuzzy adolescent cheek, and whispered, Take me, right here, right now! By now I look like a super model, which angers me more than my shattered privacy. I’m not the cover of some fashion magazine, expertly lit, airbrushed, and painted for your masturbating pleasure. I’m a real live girl with scars and stretch marks, washing off after a mile swim, cooling down, cleaning chlorine out of my hair, so it doesn’t wreck the color, planning the rest of my day. Real women don’t like to talk to strange teenage boys in the shower. Real people think about that sort of thing for a real long time. Real people bleed when you cut them. Real women anxiously watch white tiled entryways long after little boys confront them. They wash up quick, keeping an eye out for a green coat sleeve poking out from behind every wall. In real life that sort of thing changes a woman, whether she admits it or not. I don’t think he realized that; didn’t see me in three dimensions. He's not the only modern adolescent who lacks such depth perception. I pointed him out to the desk clerk the very next day, as he sauntered through the weight room, like he was a law abiding health nut with every right to wear a white t-shirt and grey sweat pants after he’d violated me the day before and two other women the day before that. I don’t want to know that kid at 25 without teenage consequences. I pressed charges. I guess in real life, when he gets out of jail, he can tell all his friends he talked to a real live naked woman.
6.
Go Fish 03:11
I don’t have any track marks. Hard drugs are for the cowardly and uncreative. The only interesting thing about doing them is not doing them any more. I hear that’s hard. And, maybe, coming up with enough cash to fund a good solid mom-busts-into-your-room, intervention, re-hab-bound habit. But you can just scramble for rent and save your septum. Self abuse isn’t radical. It’s just lazy. You want to be real hard-core? Do your laundry and make it to work on time. Look at your own dying face in the mirror. My father chased every day of his life since thirty with a bottle of scotch. I am not impressed. He just saved himself the trouble of having to raise his own children. And everyone noticed. Where’s the subtlety in that? You can knock decades off your life with a little ingenuity, and noone’ll be the wiser. See the trick is... Having the balls to devour your own flesh while everyone’s watching. Now that is BAD ASS! Cries for help are for the weak. I don’t even ask for directions in small towns. Oh, I’m not saying I aint had it hard. I’ve had to build closet organizers to accommodate my skeletons. But I don’t need to torture myself with butcher knives and sleeping pills, I just get out of bed every morning. There are a thousand imaginative ways to push yourself to the edge. Time is helping me along. I don’t have patience for the maudlin and painfully obvious. My mother is proud of her child. I am a responsible and upstanding citizen. But i have invented fifty-three silent killers, and they’re eating me alive while you watch. My therapist says..... I DON’T HAVE A FUCKING THERAPIST!! I write poetry and spend that hundred dollars an hour on new shoes. I wear two rapes on my lapel like merit badges. I drink to prove I don’t have to be my father. At any given moment there are fifteen monkeys poised to jump on my back. But not one of them can quite get a grip, because there isn’t a drug harder to master than self-control. So you want to shove needles up your arm, or whittle yourself away, vomiting ex-lax? Be my guest. That just clears you off my teetering path across the winking eyelid of doom. And I’ll be damned if I don’t make it to the opposite tear duct. You see in life, you have two choices: You can take every short stick you’ve been handed and build crutches to limp around on. You won’t get far, but you’ll get pity. Or you can use them as a tool to chisel a mark so deep in posterity you’d have to sandblast right through to erase it. I take every bad card I’ve been dealt and play a marathon game of go fish with the demons from my waking reality. I run tragedy through my head like a laundry list of reasons I’m still walking under the weight. I drag every fucked-up thing that’s ever happened behind me like a dead chain gang. And I’m not cutting one of them loose. They’re helping me build muscle mass. I don’t have hope. I’ve got tenacity, and an insight into this fresh hell that’d put a newborn puppy on prozac. So what’re you going to do? You going to let that demon win? Carve “Uncle” across your chest with razor blades and cigarette burns? Or you going to look him straight in the eye and say, Go Fish
7.
I’m just sitting down to breakfast; just hunching bleary over my eggs and toast and coffee, struggling to find my daily vertical, fighting that incessant growing urge to just curl up right there. Let sleep have its way. Let the cats have my eggs. It’d be great if that was all I had to worry about; Who gets the eggs? me? or the cats? But I’ve got to think about those eggs. Are they free range? Organic? Did the chickens who laid them lead happy lives? There’s nothing simple about breakfast any more. Because vegetables and milk are full of weird pesticides and hormones. And everything causes cancer, even water. And if it’s low-fat it probably has some newfangled side-effect like anal leakage. And meat, Jesus! meat, meat carries bizarre new diseases that make your brain tissue dissolve and run out your eyeballs. And if you think that’s all there is to it, you live in a box, because 8 dolphins died for the tuna sandwich I’m having for lunch. My favorite candy bar displaced 4000 workers in a small town in Ohio when its company relocated to Mexico. The fishermen who caught my dinner’s salmon filet stopped off to club some baby seals and burn 20 acres of rain forest on the way back to port. And the pizza place that makes that incredible deep dish with lots of garlic donates money to the Michigan Militia. SEE I can’t have breakfast without hurting somebody. All my cosmetics were tested on the raw exposed ribcage of a live rabbit before I bought them. All my clothes were made for ten cents an hour by a ten year old Malaysian girl. When I do laundry, the detergent runs down the drain and destroys an entire ecosystem. The station that carries my favorite show won’t air pro-choice commercials. It doesn’t want to be controversial, but it will show “Hope for Change” ads, that boast an opportunity to escape being gay The nearest dry cleaner supports a candidate who penned a bill that would put the Jews back in concentration camps. My phone company downsized three times in the last five years, even though in each one of those years, its STOCK SPLIT TWICE I’m afraid to buy toilet paper. Who knows? Next week we’ll probably find they squeeze live baby sheep to make it. And when I fix my hair, or drive down the street, or turn on a lamp, I’m probably burning more ozone, or killing the culture of the last Indian tribe in Brazil, or reinstating apartheid, or giving machine guns to neo-nazis, when DAMN IT all I wanted to do was eat my eggs and toast.
8.
Last night, this guy played guitar on stage, and it made me think of you, because you play guitar on stage. So I spent the next fifteen minutes running a mental slide show. LOS ANGELES: You give me half of your egg salad sandwich INDIANAPOLIS: You grab me, because the smell of gasoline on my fingers turns you on. CHICAGO: We play Ferris Bueller and follow a kids’ tour group at the Institute of Arts ASHLAND; You bowl five strikes in a row. Etcetera, etcetera.... I find this still happens a lot. Someone’s wearing shoes, so I think of you, because you wear shoes. You drink beverages. YOU BREATH AIR! You can see how this might be a problem. Sometimes I just blurt your name out loud in my apartment for no reason like a tourettes outburst, and I’m supposed to write this poem about you, because I keep saying I’m a poet. And I’ve been trying for the three years since you stopped bowling in my presence, but it keeps coming out like, I hate you, I hate you, I wish I’d never agreed to date you. or The day you left, the sun set for the last time, the trees wilted, and happy little creatures ceased to scurry. or My heart is a block of frozen, solid, petrified, cold, really hard ice without you. or I don’t need you. Never did. I CAN OPEN MY OWN PICKLE JARS MOTHERFUCKER!!! Oh, I can write volumes about every little one-night-stand-pointless-encounter-waste-of-saliva I’ve tried to replace you, but you? You’re drying up the ink in all my favorite pens. You’re shorting out my keyboard and hiding all my journals. You are the quintessential cock block, if I had a cock. You are the ultimate writer’s block..... No, wait, that one works. The point is, I know you can eat a whole egg salad sandwich, but I appreciate the gesture. And that stretch of 90/94 from Chicago to Rockford has never been the same since I drove it home from the end of time. And when you stayed over this past spring, you slept on the couch, took a shower, and left. But it took me three days to take your towel out of the bathroom and five more to wash it. I find I can’t really write about something unless I have a little distance perspective, but you’re still mashed up against me like a Siamese twin. And the kicker is I can’t even say I want you back. You were all shades of fiasco. I was only on your mind if I was waving my arms in front of you. And having sex with you?!? I suspect you wouldn’t have known the difference if I had been inflatable. And you only gave me the sandwich because you were BEING SUCH AN ASSHOLE So if you asked, would I take you back? Yeah I totally would. And that pisses me off. But if I was with you right now, I’d be sitting in some hotel room in New York, getting my ass kicked at Scrabble, or pitching a makeshift baseball game in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. And my debt would be twice as ridiculous. And I’d weigh a hundred pounds, because you supplement eating and sleeping and not in any good way. But I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be running my stupid life. You are the rockstar me I’m too impatient to wait for. And you’ve got nothing to do with anything. Most of my friends don’t even know what you look like. So you’re all mine. And a terrible kisser and a really sore loser. And I suspect you’ll litter my life with unfinished pages about the empty spaces you left in my apartment for years to come. And tonight, when someone asks to borrow a guitar pick, or uses the words, and or the I’ll think of you; snapshot something somewhere away from here and today. Not much I can really do about that, just thought I’d mention it, because it was on my mind.

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A hilarious collection of musings, stories, and rants from the troubled mind of snarky poet, Thadra Sheridan

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released June 23, 2014

Engineered by Dessa Darling at Medida Studios, "After the Bowling Stopped" engineered by Ted Vig in his basement, Photography and design by Erik Evans, Guitar by Ted Vig, Written and Performed by Thadra Sheridan

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Thadra Sheridan Minneapolis, Minnesota

Writer, Performer, Humorist, Teacher Thadra Sheridan has performed her works on stages from HBO's Def Poetry Jam to San Quentin Penitentiary. She writes a regular column on opineseason.com, and tries very hard to avoid waiting tables. Her recent film, "Waiting" recently went viral when it was picked up by Upworthy. ... more

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