Watching six seasons of the Nanny while my long-term relationship fell apart
Was more self-inflicted boredom than nostalgia
As Maxwell chased Fran up and down the staircase with a frying pan
And I lay in bed, listening to the distant sound of trains
Pulling their shit-for-brains cargo through the dark

There are some months when all art feels worthless
And life feels thin, and weak and full of spite
And the pastel hysteria of spring of outside the window
Just makes me wince with disappointment and rage
And the total, mind-numbing futility of it all
Often, I think about the man who walked into the National Gallery
And punched a hole straight into a ten million-dollar Monet painting
Of a sailboat, drifting down a river of autumn leaves
And got sent to prison for five years

There’s nothing in this world more boring than heartbreak
It’s like a tax audit of the soul
And what once seemed rare and poignant
And full of emotional promise
Just makes me want to dose myself to the brim with horse tranquilizers
And take a long vacation to skeleton town

There’s only so much sitting by the window
Begging the moon for punishment
You can take, before you have to get mad
And stride up and down the toiletries aisles of the grocery store
Wishing every old woman painstakingly reading the back of a Listerine packet
An expedient journey to hell
and all the poets you loved
reveal themselves to be little bitches

Whose constant need to reupholster their pain
seems sad & extravagant
like grief factories, polluting the local waterways with pathos and nuance

The present has overflowed and turned the whole past bad
Ancient Greece, art nouveau, the entire Italian renaissance
All ruined
Monet too, with his surfeit of waterlilies
Wilting in the heat like a loose-leaf salad

I sit like Nostradamus
In my kingdom of disappointment
Burning down the cities of the future
Going through my google calendar
listing all the bad things to come

By Hera Lindsay Bird

Check out other work in the Strange Faces Other Minds series.