MONDAY  

By Mather Schneider

Been busy? he asks. I’m spraying his curbside Cyprus 
where he thinks he saw a wasp. Yes, I say. That’s good,

he says, it makes the time go faster. What I want
to do is raise the hose and shoot the frothy Cyfluthrin

in his face and tell him, No it doesn’t you
fruitcake, and even if it did why

would I want time to go faster? Time goes
too fast anyway. I’m not in sixth grade staring

at the minute hand on the wall like it might jump
forward so I can go out to play or fixating

on the X on the calendar wishing Santa
would hurry up and get here. No, I’m 57 years old

and every day my back aches worse and my 
hair is grayer and my eyes are heavier 

in the rear-view mirror as I drive through the opulent
suburbs making sure to politely give way 

at the adorable round-abouts for the blessed opportunity 
to spray rich pricks’ yards for bugs that only live 

a week or at most a couple months and do you 
think they want time to go faster?

What soulless reptile can’t feel the sublime 
undertow of it all slipping away each moment and see 

in every lacerated husk and feet-up invertebrate
his own rotting corpse? This pot-bellied lobster

who spends his days watching game shows 
or doing cross-words or jig-saws or watering down 

his white-as-a-salt-flat driveway or waiting
for me so he can tell me being busy makes time go faster

and that’s a good thing, absolutely, that’s a good thing.
Instead, I just say, Yeah, I guess, crank the long 

hose onto its spool and get in the truck where
the dash clock has been six hours 

slow for several years and the power
steering groans almost as much as I do. 

Mather Schneider's poetry and prose have appeared in many places since 1994. He has books on Amazon and lives in Tucson, Arizona, where he works as an exterminator.