I promise to tidy up before company arrives [poem]

I promise to tidy up before company arrives
I wouldn’t want to leave my shoes
and daydreams
all over the floor
covering up the neat facade
of our life together

Today I will move all my half-read books
to the half-empty bookcase
in the guest room
where we rarely house guests,
My places carefully marked with
whatever I can find at hand—
An old ticket stub, faded and yellowed, in
Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons,
a post-it note phone number
of a long-forgotten acquaintance in
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway,
a three-year-old love letter in
Neil Gaiman’s Stardust (how fitting!),
Marking the places I will return to
when I have got the time

Tomorrow I will dust the living room,
and scrub the kitchen
clean of all the food splatters of
day-to-day living—
The remnants of who we are what we eat
scrubbed clean until marble surfaces
sparkle like showroom kitchens.
The dusty layers of disuse
will be cleared from the unlived-in
“living room” which has
become a place of storage for
Things-I-do-not-need-to-deal-with-
immediately

I have become practiced in messy organization,
of tucking things out of sight
in drawers, thrown haphazardly in boxes,
cluttered in closets in the attic,
while you’re not looking.
A pile of correspondence, bills, greeting cards
“neatly” obscures the surface of my desk—
I know exactly where everything is
so long as you don’t disturb my (dis)order

I promise to tidy up before company arrives
so that all they will see is the
practiced perfection, surface beauty
of our happy life
full of hidden chaos

http://www.kerriewarren.com.au/patterns-in-chaos/