Tsaurah Litzky's housecleaning tips...

Cleaning The Toilet

I don’t even notice

the brown grit building up in the bottom of the bowl

until it looks like the black hole of all my sins,

a build-up of lies, evasions,

the mixed messages I send out.

the excesses I take in,

that extra helping of kasha varniskes,

the spoons full of peanut butter I eat

straight from the jar at night when I can’t sleep.

Then, this morning, as I’m standing up to flush

I see the crust of blackness at the bottom of my life,

see where I am going, down into the sewers with the alligators.

I grab the new toilet brush I got at Bed, Bath and Beyond

last week when the fear of death overwhelmed me so much

I had to buy something, anything, to prove I was still alive,

I’m out of Mr. Clean so I fling open the door to the cabinet

under the sink, get the bottle of Windex, take off the cap and

pour it all into the bowl and the water turns blue,

lapis lazuli blue, blue as the Nile, blue as perfect twilight,

blue as the eyes of a magical cat.

I get to work, scrub and scrub, working the brush round and

round, leaning into it, bending my back, using my whole arm,

until the crud at the bottom of the bowl

the blackness, the blackness, the blackness begins to crack

and float around in the blu-ey water like pebbles,

little pebbles getting smaller and smaller,

some of them small as a grain of sand.

Tsaurah Litzky

Tsaurah Litzky's list of accomplishments goes on for days. A teacher of both text and yoga, and among the greater things, also a regular contributor to my old "zines" beet and pink pages, back in the print era...google her at your leisure...