Seattle Times Daily Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft
September 1, 2009


As Sly Stone said you don't have to be a star
baby but those were the days before eBay
when you knew a blackberry by the thorn
and porn was Playboy not plastic to ogle
blue lit online. Nobody's avatar sang alto
your identity equaled you tap tap no erase
you knew your place and everybody died


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for the second day in a row our neighbors at the idyllic *SIGH* lake are having their septic tank pumped. This is very very very loud and my brain is ahum with the thrum of the motor sucking muck from underground two doors down. What an awful soul-snatching sound. Omnipresent as mosquito hum in the middle of the night, reverberating off the mountains on the opposite shore, pounding through my pores like guilt or fear of the dark. They don't admit defeat these neighbors and whatever is wrong with the plumbing - sludge coming up into the kitchen sink or a stink behind the house after a washload - they will wrestle it into submission through whatever noisy and neighborhood disturbing means money can put at their disposal. Disposal is a problem here where nothing untoward must fall into the lake, though make no mistake these folks put plenty they shouldn't into the lake. Their lawn in the desert uplands along Lake Chelan could be a putting green. Men don't only come to mow and loudly weed whack the perimeter, they pour onto it nitrogen and potassium soon to be to dear to add to crops and that other p chemical my mind is too full of hideous hum to come up with. It sounds like a plane coming in to land on a tether to stop it landing so that the jets perpetually fret just above the runway right next to our house.