Robert Earl Stewart

AN HOSTILITY OF TOYS

Robert Earl Stewart

And finally, eventually
you arrive at this place, this station in life,
where the only strain of control you have
is an angry brand of housework:
the dishes as a form of judgment,
free-range paper detail as criticism,
where she leaves things as psychoanalysis
laundry as theatre—
And then you have children. And then everything
becomes a kind of porn:
everything is in extremis, without a bourgeois plateau.
Sterilization the expected domestic ideal
a fetish of folding in a vacuum of sleep, where no
stolen moments escape, kisses go unbestowed
in favour of another pass with the hoover, where no
sweet gesture goes unpunished. And you are naught
The house is lost.

A group of turkeys is a raft; crows a murder;
priests come in a blackness; a consumption of pies;
a mullet of wankers; an equivocation of Jesuits;
a transcendence of marijuana; an insolvency
of arts majors—
And this second carpet of children's things,
when I walk in the door and see it now,
this hostility of toys, I know it is a blessing.
Where would I be if this was not here,
If it was suddenly taken from us?
Give over your need to alphabetize and cubbyhole
along with your need to drive a stake
through the heart of disorganization, and instead drive
it through the heart of order, and raise a flag on it,
a standard above your fortress of couch cushions and afghans,
where you read comics and eat grapes and cheese
and spend whole evenings on your knees,
and live here, unapologetically.

Robert Earl Stewart's work has appeared in Poetry Super Highway, The Quarterly Staple, Nthposition, Blank Magazine and Fresh Boiled Peanuts. He lives in Windsor, Ontario.