Saturday, February 6, 2010

Stripping Down


This week's readwritepoem prompt asked us to be inspired by the idea of "mental wallpaper." I found myself thinking about the wallpaper in our first house.
Our first house was papered inside,
A cavernous nightmare
Of interior design disasters
Every surface—walls and ceilings,
Cupboard doors—covered
In at least three layers
Of other people’s perceptions
Of pretty and cozy

Nothing about that paper was right
The stems and vines
Of the floral patterns
Seemed to fight for release
While the little farmhouse prints
In the kitchen seemed
Too small and suspicious
Of each other

And I worked like hell to rid myself
Of that paper,
Like a madwoman from a
Charlotte Perkins Gillman story,
I hunched and sprayed and scraped
And even gouged
The very walls I sought to rescue
From those layers of ugly

Oh, I know that the paper was once
Someone’s vision of home
But you can’t paper yourself
Into domestic tranquility
After a while, the paper turns
Into a sponge
Absorbing all the nasty smells
Of your past

I’d like to say I learned my lesson:
I’ve never papered over
A wall, never over committed
To a pattern but still
I’ve had to spray and scrape
And rip my way clear
When I found myself knee-deep
In my own domestic mistakes

8 comments:

  1. While the little farmhouse prints
    In the kitchen seemed
    Too small and suspicious
    Of each other
    I loved these lines, just wonderful.
    You are in my top ten favorite poet's list.
    xoxo

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  2. Wonderful insights here, Erin. I love this wording particularly:

    But you can’t paper yourself
    Into domestic tranquility
    After a while, the paper turns
    Into a sponge
    Absorbing all the nasty smells
    Of your past


    Your use of "domestic tranquility" made me think of the US Constitution and how even that venerable parchment too has absorbed its share of nasty smells from our national past. The paper never brings what it promises...

    Insightful and beautiful, the observation that, even with the greatest of care, we all have to spray and scrape and rip to free ourselves of our own mistakes. Beautiful metaphor, wallpaper!

    Thanks, Erin!

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  3. Pity you didn't realise that you can paint straight over it. I did . Covered red and navy blue stripes.

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  4. "Absorbing all the nasty smells of your past" I love that line and what you did with this week's prompt.

    Pamela

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  5. "you can't paper yourself/Into domestic tranquility..." So true. And the little farmhouse prints fighting with one another. So much out of a strip of wallpaper. Thanks, Erin!

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  6. ". . .you can’t paper yourself
    Into domestic tranquility
    After a while, the paper turns
    Into a sponge
    Absorbing all the nasty smells
    Of your past."
    That's my favorite part in a poem that I really relate to. You should have seen the wallpaper borders in each of our downstairs rooms in this house when we bought it ten years ago. The pattern was a gaudy dark Victorian drapery, loop-over-loop of it, with shiny brassy rickrack trim, topped off with heavy gold tassels. I expected to hear the organ from the Phantom groan through the walls.....

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  7. i love the phrasing 'domestic mistakes'

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  8. There's that one-two punch finale again. Erin, you are my hero!

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