Your Unemployed Daughter

photo credit: Hello Simon Swatman

Recently, a friend hacked into another friend’s Facebook account. (Friend 2 had been on Facebook at Friend 1’s apartment the night before, so the hack was a punishment of sorts for the second friend’s forgetting to close out. As such, it was not so much a hack as opportunistic maneuvering, but I digress.)

Friend 1 decided to change Friend 2’s status. What to say?, she thought. What to say? As many of us do in those moments, she turned to … William Carlos Williams, man of multiple employments and enigmatic phrasings. More specifically, to this poem:

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Hilariously and maybe subliminally, Friend 1 realized then that Friend 2’s profile photo was actually of her reaching into an icebox, as if to grab a few illicit, succulent plums and eat them herself. How apropro! Yet Friend 2, upon discovery of the status update, expressed concern that her 663 friends might (incorrectly, mind you) assume she was some sort of hookup/plum bandit, seeking out plum-preferring men in bars and going home with them to, presumably, make out and then consume their chilled fruits on the sly.

This concern, while perhaps not rational, was highly amusing to YUD, for she has had various men, in various stages of employment, eat things from her refrigerator including: bologna, hummus, thin-sliced havarti, cold pasta, pickles both gherkin and dill, and turkey lasagna. There was also that guy who, when I shared an apartment with two others, came home with one of them and in a state of drunken delirium in the middle of the night, mistook our refrigerator for a latrine and attempted to pee in a box of leftover pizza. Had WCW been there, he might have penned it like this:

This Is Just To Say

I have pissed on
the pepperoni slices
that were on
the middle shelf of your fridge

and which
you were definitely
saving
for breakfast, lunch, and dinner

Forgive me
I was highly intoxicated
and in my blackout drunkenness
they seemed much like
a commode

I, on the other hand, unemployed or not, recollect eating pretty much nothing from the refrigerators of men over the years—unless it was a grilled cheese sandwich, and that involved a boyfriend who cooked them for me—and I certainly never confused a Maytag for an American Standard.

Plums, pizza, the endless human cycle of eating and digesting…it all brings me, in a William Carlos Williams sort of way, to today’s TGMTU:
Says Derek, “This strawberry was laying in the middle of the street. Beauty in the ugliest places.”

TGMTU #4 © Derek Ivie

That’s right, friends. Beauty, leftovers, and those who want to pee on your leftovers, or hijack your Facebook account. Stay alert.

I will leave you with another WCW, called “The Artist.” (Could just as well be titled “The Magazine Staffer,” I think. Or, “The Unemployed.” No, I don’t think he’s talking about that Mr. T.)

The Artist

Mr T.
bareheaded
in a soiled undershirt
his hair standing out
on all sides
stood on his toes
heels together
arms gracefully
for the moment
curled above his head.

Then he whirled about
bounded
into the air
and with an entrechat
perfectly achieved
completed the figure.

My mother
taken by surprise
where she sat
in her invalid’s chair
was left speechless.
Bravo! she cried at last
and clapped her hands.

The man’s wife
came from the kitchen:
What goes on here? she said.
But the show was over.

—William Carlos Williams