Mather Schneider

Watching Cement Dry

When I was 16
I worked for the Peoria Park District 
and one fall
we put in new sidewalks.
At the end of the work-day the cement was still wet
and someone needed to stand guard
to make sure no one vandalized the sidewalks
before they solidified.
You know how people like to put their names and footprints
on everything.
I volunteered to watch the cement
every night for a week.
For 7 whole days I could sleep late,
come to the park at 5 p.m. and stay until midnight
watching cement dry, that gray pudding, that
hardening river.
I sat on a little metal pony in the children’s playground
bolted down
with a big rusty spring at the base,
dead crooked eyes, chipped
blue paint. It was cold
in Illinois, late November,
and I sat on that metal pony
and tried to read Nietzsche
by the light of a street lamp.
God was dead and nobody could see me
and I learned that reading Nietzsche just isn’t
the same if no one can see you doing it.
Nobody came to vandalize,
it seemed the universe didn’t give
two shits about me
or Nietzsche or
the drying cement.
Occasionally a tree leaf
fell
and got caught in the cement
like how fossils or memories form
and once I chased a dog off
like a blurry fear in my mind.
I wanted to understand
what was happening to me
and what to do about it,
wrapped in my fat cocoon coat
and caterpillar mittens, turning the pages
of Beyond Good and Evil, licking my fingers,
wool on my tongue.
Life wasn’t as clear-cut
as a flawless flat sidewalk
to a flawless flat heaven
as I sat alone straining forward
on my metal pony,
muttering futile protests to the teeth-
freezing wind.

 

The Old Man and the Pantoum

I tried to write a pantoum poem
about the repetition of my days

thinking the repetition involved in the form
would echo the repetition of my days.

The pantoum was to be about my job
cleaning the shopping center parking lot every day,

how I pace that hot black sea of pavement
and those gravel islands like Robinson Crusoe

picking up the trash thrown by the Starbuck-slurping shoppers
who can’t wait until they get home to rip

into their purchases and fling the tags
and hangers and stuffing and bags

to the poor pitiful earth
as if it was their last God-given right

and how the homeless drug addicts with faces like mutilated clocks
lean into the garbage cans looking for their souls

or that moment when their lives went sideways
tossing the refuse out

faster than I can put it back in,
how they sit against the stucco wall in their nests

of foul sweatshirts and Pop tart boxes and rotten deli meat
and dented cans of noodle soup and drool

and the thousands of little pieces of aluminum foil
that they smoke their drug from

scattered around like Christmas tinsel
or the wrappings of chocolate kisses,

how they leave hard black admirably articulated turds
in broad daylight,

how they go into the stores and grab what they want
and bolt out the emergency exit doors

as if they have cheated death,
as if they have conquered Rome,

how they have thrown their lives away
as I have thrown away mine,

how they ask me what time it is
as if they have somewhere else to be.

But no
my Pantoum fizzled out around the 3rd stanza.

I did not have the discipline and it seemed useless
when I tried to describe the green dumpster

that hulks guiltily in its nasty concrete crib
like an immovable object against an unstoppable force,

how I feed it until it vomits,
how it all repeats each day and how it is a hard task

to always be the same man.
What is clean in the afternoon is dirty again each morning

and there is a sad feeling that nothing is going anywhere
and even the wind plays games with me moving

what I try to pick up just out of my reach
as I chase it across the parking lot like a dream,

the parking lot that many seem to mistake
for the Indianapolis speedway,

how I try to think of the job as exercise
to give myself some stoic pluck

and remember the wise men said the secret to freedom
is to envy no one,

how I pass by the storefronts whose doors open
to the fresh breeze of new clothes and soft pretzels

where the floors are crematorium white,
where I go inside to use the bathroom in humility

and wash my hands,
the hands of an old man

who tried to write a pantoum
to give his day some music

and some meaning
but only threw it in the trash and went to work.

Dream Job

I drink 20 beers and get into a spat
with a pretentious twat on Twitter.
He says Hemingway “cribbed” everything
from Gertrude Stein.
The world is blessed with a never-ending supply
of lit-zits who go to universities and read books
with the sole purpose of having something
to be smug about.
We’re going broke here in our small Mexican town.
Natalia’s doctor bills are eating us alive
and all the pills and therapy
and of course my beer.
We’ve been talking about selling our home.
This was our dream and we made it come true.
Now the only dreams I have are when I’m sleeping.
We’ll probably have to move back to Tucson.
Maybe I can find a job at Home Depot
or driving a delivery truck for Amazon
or a stock boy at Walmart
or a security guard in the parking lot
of a telemarketing conglomerate.
When I pass out I dream I am applying for a job
at We Went Wong’s,
7 or 8 of us waiting to be interviewed.
We wait standing up in a phonebooth.
A man comes to summon us.
He is short and maybe 20 years old
with corn-silk hair combed sideways.
I haven’t owned a comb in 30 years.
I don’t find out if I get the job
or not because I wake up.
I am so dehydrated my eyelids scrape against my eyeballs.
I trudge to the bathroom
and look at myself in the mirror,
ask myself if I would hire me
if I was the last person on earth.

 

Mather Schneider's poetry and prose have been published in many places since 1995. His novel, The Bacanora Notebooks, was recently released by Anxiety Press. He lives in Tucson and works as an exterminator.