Desktop chaos

(it's messy but it's neat)

There's a scribbled line speaking inky Shakespeare; I could stare at skulls handheld like Hamlet in Act V, to be or not to be, but I sit instead wishing there was nobody in the washroom—I really have to pee. I form analogies like a calculator, abacus clinking bricks into a sublime arithmetic. There's remote-control southern twang like a cow bell--gotta have more cowbell--from the stereo in corner. I stare at my two best friends, their picture on my desk; so beautiful, and their smiles never closer. At the edge is a pile of used post-its; ballpoint with nib unscrewed sits waiting at an angle. Empty envelopes for letters never sent or letters ignored--there’s always a more important letter on the way. My address book gets emptier by the hour, so I substitute for love the bits of wisdom I've gleaned from that true granite witness sitting serious on my desk; I call it a book; it is a big one, a big fat book of famous quotations--and it's scaring me witless. My brain spreads out like the speakers, spaced out just so to maximize the wavelength effect, to ameliorate my synesthetic sound-sing-speak experience. There’s a telephone too, black and plastic, clanging bells and fizzing receivers, like Bill Cosby if he were made of plastic. A glass half full of hi-liters and paper clips; I’ve never drunk from it but if I need yellowness I’ll know where to look. It’s oak that's housed decades of hard work and self-discipline (by others, brothers, not just me), tossed into this rubbish bonfire, and my new lease-sheets, my papered place to live, might burst into flames along with the wood (no good). The Iliad perches precariously above the wastebasket, and my electrical wires cross indiscriminately, but that’s just me; I let my wires be. The laptop has never seen the top of a lap per se, so I label it a liar—I can’t stand falsity in advertising. I look to Lou and Gord for edgy repartée; their cds are lying empty in the case, so I turn on the lamp, light up the whole place--it’s no halogen but so what, we can’t all save the planet. Not when we think and work in this desktop disaster-math, my dusty flat chaos giving good folks at Office Depot a hardy-har heart attack....