Did you just brag you measure your life in sheets of toilet paper?
Stuck to the bottom of your foot, uncoiling the roll as you leave the bathroom you are a Charmin spider, exuding and unspooling your load as you walk through the living room and out the door, taking the bus to work where you circle the conference table until your boss is wrapped like a Halloween mummy so they send you to Paris and you are on the airplane jet trails of TP streaming and screaming out behind you, you’re a paper Frequent Flyer, Million Miler club of all the crap you’ve had to deal with, don’t cry or the world cries with you and we have to wipe the whole soggy gobbledegoo from our eyes our front yards the earth a trail of tears and a white Christmas after all?
Be careful – no smoking – or you will light a fuse and find the world is a bowl of cherry bombs, an explosion of blackberry cobbler without sanitary napkins, a spark that follows you back igniting your history if not your imagination, unwinding and spiraling the idiots and maniacs into torched frenzy until at the very end of the line you find your head in a gas oven like Sylvia daddy daddy daddy
with poems burning their way across the kitchen floor.
Shay’s Word Garden
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qbit 
This is both very funny and seriously in-point! The whole toilet paper theme is hilarious and includes dozens of priceless lines. But the way you bring it around to say, don;t let your past devour you, is anything but funny, it is words to live by. And yeah, Sylvia at the end, baking someone unhappy. First rate stuff, my friend. So glad you wrote for the word list!
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Have to echo Shay here–this is just great writing. I’m not a big admirer of Plath as a human, or of some of her overly stressed themes, but there is no denying she took a genius in poetry from this world with that oven. Here you draw all the things that make me uncomfortable about her work into a seamless, paper mummy-wrap, show how it is what it is, thin as tissue, and do so with an insight,wit and humor that is as black as a TP White Christmas. Excellent, excellent poem, and super solid use of the list words.
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Thank you!!!
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Wow. A masterful write that had me laughing and groaning at the narcissist in us all, including Plath. TP was the perfect metaphor to roll out in this ego-puncturing satire.
Pax,
Dora
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Anyone that can use sheets of toilet paper in their poem and metaphor deserves a Pulitzer prize!! This is brilliant and utterly fitting as well! Amazing writing as always Qbit!
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