Laundry on Campus at Three in the Morning

I. Wash Cycle

My friend is apparently suffering
from nicotine withdrawal

But Lent is almost up.
I try not to help her sin

Even took her lighter
And smoked her quota

Though I've slipped her a few cigarettes
To keep her mind from slipping.

I don't mind so much.
Those little transgressions are very Catholic

She'll have something to confess
It'd be suspicious if she didn't

I'm cutting her off now, Lent's almost over.
Nevermind that I'm also almost out.

Her mind is affected though, and
In a sober haze, she starts to talk of Nietzche

And her Nietzchean scholar professor
Whom I recommended to her

Who apparently used to be Catholic
Like I was, like several of her friends were

And she says two of them said
that she'll come around someday

That she will toss her chastity
and the ring it's attached to

And ride into the sunset
well-courted by a swan-winged god.

It is strange, that no one she knows
who shrugged Catholicism, stayed Christian

They took up paganism, aetheism,
Buddhism and philosophy

As if, in their haste to shed the Roman shackles
Radiance fell down upon them

Lifted their minds into the cosmic shuddering
And they suddenly understood

The universal message hidden in the stones,
In the prayer beads and the reason of man

The universal message poured into three words
That would solve half America's problems

And stop the rioting fundamentalists --
As if they suddenly knew that on the bones of the world,

On the bones of the human,
Is a tatoo fading in death

And is on the undying mind
lately written and freshly inked

This grafitti:
Okay, Jesus sucks.

II. 99 Minutes in the Dryer

I listen to my friend recount the
death of a paperback philosophy

"I wrote on Marx
Because Mill floated away into oblivion

Borne away on waves that obliterated
my logic problems in the sand."

There's some poetry in that
And she made some better than I.

Had better titles too.
We debated them a while

While our jeans in separate dryers
Tumbled in hot suffocation.

Reaching in, I noted
the mugginess in the machine

Was like a man's hot icky crotch.
There's some poetry in that too.

III. 20 Minutes to Go

Response to the man in the box asking:
What do you want on your tombstone? --

She made the dash count,
My friend says after an anecdote.

Me, it depends on how I die.
If my parachute doesn't open

It'll be along the lines:
Embarking on the next adventure

But more than likely it'll be:
I helped solve the human overpopulation

By reducing it by one
And would have taken more

But, while in the process
of getting all the stupid people I know

Into a single room for their premeditated
removal from the human race,

the stupid fumes overwhelmed me
and I spontaneously combusted.

IV. Folding

The only French I know
Are the words to a Rufus Wainwright song

My friend knows it from a movie
I know it from the CD

I know other languages better
Spanish, German, Japanese, and

A little Gaelic because Joyce
made me angry Irish.

With all the vocabulary built up in my head
I speak words untranslatable into English

That are bold in spirit, soft in love
Foreign ideas to the Webster construction.

But I wish I knew a broader lexicon
For I have no words

That are distant enough
Or soft enough

For the shame on her face
As she speaks of a beating

Brought down by brother's hands
Lashing out in animal hate

Stopped only when her parents came
Summoned by her screams.

The bruises on her body faded long before
She had to hide them from anyone

Before she could retreat to college
And lock the door.

And I stand, listening, the machines
shaking, my heart thumping and shrinking

And growing again in rapid pulse
a rapid beat of belated anger

Empty and impotent, my hands
close round an imagined throat.

I once had a crush on her brother
His huge and heavy frame

And I wonder what mask he used
To hide that monstrous soul?

If I could break it,
and bare that festering cancer to the world

Who else would be reviled?
Would someone bolder than I

Take revenge for that soft
and shameful voice

That should be laughing
And never quieter

Than the manifest voice
Of a woman who stands

Straight-shouldered, unfolding
Ready to strike back.