Thursday, April 2, 2009

Home Economics


This is in response to readwritepoem's napowrimo prompt #2, which asks writers to take 5 nouns and 5 verbs from one subject/discipline, and use them to write a poem about another subject. I have chosen to write about housecleaning/home economics using math terms. I'm afraid this poem shows my limited abilities in both subjects:


There is no equation for perfect housekeeping—
no rational number of things to be cleaned.
Dirty clothes multiply overnight. Dust bunnies
divide and travel from room to room. Surely

a vicious distributive property is at work:
Estimate the time needed to scrub this bathroom,
and apply it to the other two,
and I get an equivalent fraction of my life wasted

on the lowest common denominator.
Sooner or later we are all reduced to scrubbing
off our own dirt. If I were organized enough to
graph that time, I doubt I would like the slope of that line.

8 comments:

  1. and I get an equivalent fraction of my life wasted

    on the lowest common denominator.
    Sooner or later we are all reduced to scrubbing
    off our own dirt

    you can't get anymore honest than that. I just finished doing housework so this poem is very fitting.

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  2. I just said to my husband that I felt like I was trapped in the cycle of dishes and laundry, never making one bit of progress...and then I read this!

    "my life wasted/on the lowest common denominator"

    I don't want to know "the slope of that line" either!!!

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  3. As a budding economist I must say I found this particularly interesting. Technically speaking this would be a maximization of utility problem but well... heh :) Lovely poem :)

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  4. "A vicious distributive property" indeed! I hate housework too, but would never be able to express it so well. Thanks!

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  5. love this: sooner or later we are all reduced to scrubbing off our own dirt.

    indeed!

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  6. Sooner or later we are all reduced to scrubbing/
    off our own dirt.

    Great line! Thanks for the read.

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  7. I like it...... a lot! Very ingenious, genius! So this is how it works for the readwritepoem. I signed on last night, adding that I didn't trust myself to follow through. Now that I see we are supposed to post the poems we write at our blogs I'm even less inclined. I still might do it just as an exercise for myself. :)

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  8. Thanks for all the comments, everyone! Sam--I looked of "utility maximization" and I think I get it! Lydia--I hope you try posting a few poems. The rwp community is very supportive.

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