Donald
Illich
-
1 poem -
Fork and Plate
My friendship with fork
and plate is over.
We've had some good times together;
I'll never forget the day we ate a boot
at the train yard or asked the cannibals
for dinner, and received a confused head
with an apple, looking for final answers.
Fork has jabbed a few people in its time -
Idi Amin, Princess Di, the Hilton sisters -
but its days of celebrity outrage are over.
The tines have rust no metal surgeon can lift,
the handle's not up to playing tasty parts
with much younger china. Plate has loyally
carried whatever we dropped on its face,
not falling off the table to commit suicide
in shards or flinging itself at my head
for my excessive scratching trying to eat
an overdone steak. No, it even let mashed
potatoes mix with peas, though that went
against his conservative nature, its apartheid
of different food groups. Me, I used to fill
myself like a piggybank until I was nothing
but fat jowls and a snout, but I'm wielding
a silver hammer now to smash myself apart,
so I can find out what's inside, what's precious
I should keep living. Plate and fork don't
want this change, wish to be atop my belly
forever. Abandoning them in the sink, I turn on
steaming water, scour them with Brillo pads
watch the hot suds swallow them up.
