Clutter-
Bug is a cute nickname until you find out the bugs are real, creepy crawling over coffee cups and couch cushions
When you live with a hoarder, you get used to clutter
You get used to stepping around picked-over paper plates and piles of half-priced pants
Clutter
Is a word I use to sort the unsorted, make short work of old porn mags and Christmas decorations that have been nothing more than clutter
For the past two years
My mother calls this “clutter”
Organized chaos
And I vow to be all of the organization
And none of the clutter
My instinct is to push away clutter
But clutter
Never goes away clutter
Just moves from one place to another uncluttered
Place until it too becomes too cluttered
Again to be considered anything other than an avalanche of error and when everything that happens to you is more clutter
There is never a comedown, and clutter
Spreads through space, pervades what came before
Until before is no more than mourning
My bedroom is a mess of clutter
Of paper and pens to sort out my head
Because I would rather have clutter
On the page than clutter
On the brain
And the clutter
I can see is the clutter
I know how to deal with.
Still, my brain is a mass of clutter
A conglomeration of imagination on top of trauma, on top of homework, on top of half-done to-do lists on top of clutter
Sometimes I try to make to-do lists of to-do lists just so I can feel less cluttered
And then I see what my mother means, how clutter
Is a wall on the edge of a cliff
The only way to get rid of it is to get out of it
Become an anti-clutter-ist
A minimalist.
The simplest way to live
Dive off the cliff of clutter
Rejoice at the thought of another
Fresh start
Until I realize
That the clutter
Is in my heart.
Rachael Blaine is a Junior Creative Writing and Publishing & Editing major from Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania. Her hobbies include driving alone on back roads and talking about her cats, and she enjoys using as many semicolons as she can get away with. She believes that art is the loaded weapon of the future and aspires to dedicate herself to helping create the ammunition.