Familiar Smell in Someone Else's Kitchen
Familiar Smell in Someone Else’s Kitchen
by Pat A Physics
Angry at the ground
kind of it’s fault
if it disappeared
into a grain of salt
I fell again
under a category
so that I was
filed away, it could ignore me
I run around in circles
trying to escape the floor
the refrigerator killed me
with an open door
the streets are much longer
with more detours for me
they always kick my ass
and I usually find a
Found commercial retelling
into an afterlife
so that I was compelled,
it could hypnotize like a whirling kite.
I’m following this poem by seeing the referent of “it” as the “ground” the poet is “angry at” in the first line and then the “floor” she/he tries to “escape” for filing him/her away “under a category.” That whole structure, which might disappear “into a grain of salt” at the beginning could reappear at the end as a hypnotizing “whirling kite.” But I don’t quite see how “it” gets there. The poet is confined to a kitchen, a space, which both diminishes, constrains, and then opens up for its occupant, and may by the poem’s title form a connection with others, “someone else,” to indicate this is the way life is structured for all of us. Is the end, though, a liberation or just more confinement?
hey man you had me at the title. identifying, right off the bat, and its effects. the universal crisis. i love how all written here is all needed.
Damn, a typo. That first “it’s” is supposed to be “its.” A possessive pronoun instead of a contraction of “it is” or “it has.”
There is always room for subtlety in the poem. I kind of bash people over the head with things like “the familiar smell,” and end up with a real amorphous bog anyway. It is kind of a hang-over spirit song.
More confinement, I say. More.
Thanks, Pat. The “whirling kite” at the end “could hypnotize” one into more confinement.