Another Odysseus Poem

Quick post from the Aegean Sea. Unreliable Wifi, so we’ll just have to make do this week.

*

I’d remembered the poem about the Sirens, but I’d totally forgotten this little masterpiece. I stumbled across it while looking for the other. What the hell, I thought. Just in case they read Wandering Among the Sirens and though it was good, I’ll share this little turdlet with them as well.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

* * * * *

i was busy vacuuming
using my hydromatic automatic suck-o-matic central vac
and when i moved the laundry room door to clean behind
(responsible guy that i am)
there was a
roach.

and reacting without a second thought
about the interdependent web of life and all that
i sucked that sucker up.

and the fury of that wind unleashed
tempest tossed
around corners and down dark passages
swirling ’round the rim
and directly into Charbodys’ maw.

washed up battered half dead
in a pile of dust
carefully crawled out (now that Charbodys had stopped)
through the exhaust pipe
and back into his cozy home in my wall.

oh what tales he’ll tell his grandchildren,
that endless voyage
that ended up about 10 feet away.

and if the old blind roach takes up the tale
ages from now
when men walk the earth no longer
(prey to the bomb or pollution or evolutionary success)
and the magnificent tales of Homer are long forgotten
young roach schoolchildren will still speak reverently
of Odysseus Roach.