Shredded

My well-meaning partner 
tasks me 
with "cleaning up" 
my "papers" — 
the ones in my home office.

As if it was a light task
that one could do
just 
like 
that.

He bought me this 
six-foot-long
wood-top standing desk
during the pandemmy
— when the four brick walls of our home
had begun to crush in on us —
for the sole purpose 
of containing me
and my archeological strata
of papers, note pads, books.


And yet —
as I enter my owl's nest, 
my study,
six years post-vaccine,
I reckon with wild strains of chaos
that my loose paper stacks breed 
unmitigated by anything Pfizer 
nor Moderna could invent and bottle.

My horizontal storage
has reached its zenith;
this free-range filing system
must be addressed with haste.
 
The wrecking ball is coming:
it will rip through 
my fifty-year-old window wall
and my vintage interior sheetrock

And this force of deconstruction
will arrive outside my window
in but a few weeks' time
with no discretion for thoughtful piles labeled:

"Review for Relevancy"; 
and "Poems in Progress";
and "Bills - maybe?"; 
and "Notable homework pieces"
(I will not further clarify between self and offspring)
and "holiday cards - find address and mail" 
(some from 2023, one from 2015);
and half-written thank-you cards, 
address scratched out once, twice, thrice, 
representing a much-traveled relative 
who has yet to receive my birthday gratitude;
and "Medical records from 2000-20."

With little zest and much animus,
I sit myself in the center 
of the wee nursery-turned-office
and I dump every colored folder
it their contents
out onto the floor
in a pile of unexagerable enormity
keep the matches away
Farhenheit 451 
could consume us all