We started trying,
my oldest brother and I,
to clean that house
in the Summer of ‘94
By the time our
first foray
into ungluing the reeking,
matted, stiffened papers
from off the sordid kitchen floor was ended,
we had unearthed our way down
to 1982
I kept thinking,
as we weekly came back
to re-accumulated drifts of
last week’s papers added to the previous,
and continued our
repulsive, dreadful archeological dig
into the lunatic detritus
of lunatic lives
That Hercules would be hard-pressed
to clean this demented domicile –
the Aegean Stables were a piece of cake
by comparison
That this
was an impossible task
Yet I could not stop
coming back and trying
to clean the house of my childhood,
perhaps to somehow clean the chaos
that had similarly accumulated
and accrued
somewhere deep inside of me