Shut Up And Eat Your Toad By James Tate

The disorganization to which I currently belong
has skipped several meetings in a row
which is a pattern I find almost fatally attractive.
Down at headquarters there’s a secretary
and a janitor who I shall call Suzie
and boy can she ever shoot straight.
She’ll shoot you straight in the eye if you ask her to.
I mow the grass every other Saturday
and that’s the day she polishes the trivets
whether they need it or not, I don’t know
if there is a name for this kind of behavior,
hers or mine, but somebody once said something or another.
That’s why I joined up in the first place,
so somebody could teach me a few useful phrases,
such as, “Good afternoon, my dear anal-retentive Doctor,”
and “My, that is a lovely dictionary you have on, Mrs. Smith.”
Still, I hardly feel like functioning even on a brute
or loutish level. My plants think I’m one of them,
and they don’t look so good themselves, or so
I tell them. I like to give them at least several
reasons to be annoyed with me, it’s how they exercise
their skinny spectrum of emotions. Because.
That and cribbage. Often when I return from the club
late at night, weary-laden, weary-winged, washed out,
I can actually hear the nematodes working, sucking
the juices from the living cells of my narcissus.
I have mentioned this to Suzie on several occasions.
Each time she has backed away from me, panic-stricken
when really I was just making a stab at conversation.
It is not my intention to alarm anyone, but dear Lord
if I find a dead man in the road and his eyes
are crawling with maggots, I refuse to say
have a nice day Suzie just because she’s desperate
and her life is a runaway carriage rushing toward a cliff
now can I? Would you let her get away with that kind of crap?
Who are you anyway? And what kind of disorganization is this?
Baron of the Holy Grail? Well it’s about time you got here.
I was worried, I was starting to fret.