How to Clean Up After a Crazy Party


Scrape the candle drippings off the table
your father made when you were two,
thinking he could raise his share of two kids
buy a twenty-five foot sailboat with a trailer,
own a house on Lake Whitney, and have an apartment in Houston,
by making tables and chairs in a barn called Whitney Woodworks.

Empty out the papers and books in the backpack
the lady from Dripping Springs,
whose divorced husband lives in an apartment on ninth street,
sent you for your high school graduation
in the hands of UPS in a medium-sized cardboard box.
and soak the backpack in the bathroom sink
filled with soapy water.

Wash the beer out of your blue tee-shirt that still fits,
eight years after wearing it in the baseball games of seventh grade,
when your dad was coach and your best friend, Fred,
said that you got to bat third because your dad was coach,
three months after covering it with dirt trying to steal home,
in the first inning of the Taos and 21st Street pick up game,
diving into the catcher, the ball safely in his glove.

Pick up the shredded remains on the floor of the balloons
David brought over along with a six pack of sixteen ounce
Busch beers he bought with the fake id he got the day you got yours
at the flea market off I-59 by Toto's parents' house four years ago,
that same night, drinking a twelve pack of Budweiser
in your back yard, leaving the empty cans under the porch
for your parents to find the next morning while working in the yard.

Throw away the pieces of the spaghetti-laced ceramic bowl 
your aunt made before she became a Spanish teacher, 
your mom gave to you when you left for college,
and your girlfriend gave back to you two weeks ago,
along with poems written on shards of paper, rings, bottles
of perfume, pictures, existential novels, and the butterfly stamp.

home

fritz

A note

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