VITAMINS AND MINERALS

1. The Rooms Look Bad
2. The Man, So Stuck
3. He Wants to Move
4. He Takes a Nap
5. He Falls Away
6. He Sleeps Too Much
7. He Needs to Breathe
8. He Finds the Book
9. Just for Example
10. And So He Does
11. Just Follow Me
12. He Grabs Some Cake
13. It Comes to This
14. The Soul Seems Lost
15. Kick Ass


1.

The rooms look bad. The rooms look bad.

The two joint rooms look gritty,
Filthy, ugly, shack and shambles. Messy, dusty, not too pretty.

The rooms look bad. The rooms look bad.

Both too long and both too narrow.
Composed of bone and not much marrow.
The double bed seems way too wide.
Against the door, they both collide.

The paint looks sloppy on the walls.
How it streaks and how it falls.
On the molding, on the door.
On the ceiling, on the floor.

The former tenant, a tortured drunk,
His color choices really stunk.
Hunter green just seems so wrong,
Wrong notes for a wrong song.

And the floor so nasty, God, the floor.
Looks beat-up like a beat-up whore.
Track marks here and absent veins,
Weathered and a thousand stains,
Scratched and bruised and badly cut.
The hard wood floors, in a hard wood rut.

“Lost and Found” lives in these cracks.
A paper clip and Apple Jacks,
Price tag from the ankle socks,
Litter from the kitten box,
A penny lodged, a nickel stuck.
Dorito’s and some “What-the-?”

The rooms look bad. The rooms look bad.

03/19/2008

Author's Note: Vitamins and Minerals was written in June 2003. It was originally performed as a One-Man-Poetry-Show at One Arm Red Theatre in DUMBO, Brooklyn. You can read the poem in its entirety. Or broken up in 15 individual pieces.

Posted on 03/19/2008
Copyright © 2024 David Garner