Cleaning Allie's Room

Allie's room is the cargo hold
spilled about an airline crash,
or a fashion store after a tornado's passing.
Actually, it's worse than that.
The clothes aren't new off the store shelf,
or freshly laundered, folded in a suitcase.
They're well worn, stained, ripped with holes
by a hydrophobic teen shunning soap, shampoo.
Candy wrappers, pizza boxes, dinner plates
seeded with fungal experiments that'd
make a botanist blush green.
Food crusted flatware, crunched cans
half-full of flat soda.

Yesterday, we discovered a world in
the narrow gap between her bed and the wall.
Pizza wedges topped with green fur cheese,
twisted eyeglasses, broken rollerblades,
desicated pet droppings, two baskets of
laundry scented with cat pee musk.
"I'll get around to it," she giggled.

Last night, lured by claims of
a promised land flowing with soured milk,
rotten sandwiches, sweet, pink gum wads,
an army scaled the wall.
Armored soldier columns advanced upon
her room under cover of darkness.

"Where's Allie?" I asked this morning.
We climbed stairs, knocked loudly,
heard muffled cries from within Fort Garbage.
We picked the lock, found her bound
to the floor with a hundred strands of twine,
each tacked neatly into floor tiles.
A t-shirt gagged her groaning mouth.
Soldier mandibles had trimmed pizza box cardboard,
constructed stairs and a bridge
across her squirming form.
There, above young Lady Gulliver,
stood the ant queen and her consorts.
Her subjects cleaned the floor below.

Scott Speck
08/01/1998