Driveway
I don’t think the whole class needed to know about
wet celery in the drain. If you never eat a plum,
how will you know what it tastes like? Sometimes
there is a buzz in my brain like a, like a what do
you call the thing that lashes out and cuts down
weeds with its vicious-fast snake of a tongue?
It’s like that, only nothing stays down for
long; the driveway of my mind won’t stay
edged, devolves into broken pavement and
ant-blasted dirty sand, all the scrubby stems,
meaningless leaves. Nobody sees them.
Everybody sees them. If you forget I was
talking about celery, don’t forget I was
talking about celery. And what
should we do with
the plum?
Marilyn Rauch Cavicchia 
This made me smile. I enjoyed the journey your poem took me on while I contemplated celery and a plum!
eat the plum…clean the celery out of the drain…those are much easier than keeping the weeds out of the driveway of my mind…smiles….this was fun, yet…
Devolves is one of my favorite words – awesome stream of consciousness.
Thanks, Anna! I had to kind of go with it today because I was very preoccupied by my daughter’s first day of school. I’m also trying not to always write pretty poems that know where they’re going.
Fun explanation: “pretty poem” — Yeah, why are those so popular? Smile.
I know what you mean about pretty poems. I have one that’s subtitled ‘The Train Wreck Rewrite’ :).
“The driveway of my mind won’t stay edged” happens to me, too, and now I know how to describe it to those who risk becoming my collateral damage.
I absolutely love the driveway metaphor and can relate to it completely. Don’t worry about the plum. I enjoyed it and it is past history.l
This poem felt like a moment in a workshop or writing class, like the speaker is critiquing the imagery in someone else’s poem, then gets off track, then gets caught up in that imagery as if it were from their own life.