The Ecphorizer

Olivia's Woes
Olivia Anderson

Issue #20 (April 1983)

I. DEBITS:        Olivia has woes which, distort as you might,
no matter how cleverly, in whatever light,
you cannot construe as anything funny.
She needs bread and she needs honey.
(She gets a little bread from an out-grown spouse,
but she lives without honey in a cold, cold house).

And hay is a necessity
for her horses, three hundred eighty three.
(That's cubic inches, not horses, I confess.
Is three hundred thirty a more stable guess?)
However many, the ravenous beasts,
ostentatiously consuming hydrocarbonous feasts
while snorting inside a fiery blue dragon,
empower an inanely characterized wagon.

Olivia needs honey, but she doesn't need fat:
her should-be-flat places proliferate that,
because she's a consumer compulsive,
approaching undifferentiate blobness repulsive:
she eats in the bathtub, she eats in the bunk,
she eats when she's sober, and more when she's drunk;
she eats when she's lonely, she eats when she's sad,
she incises especially efficiently mad.
And sometimes when smoking and to-her-toes stoned
for lack of calorific substance has moaned.
But: her blubber can curdle;
she won't wear a girdle.

The only advantage
to all this addage
is, sitting, the paddage.

II. CREDITS:    On this, a more positive side of the ledger
are assets accrued from a previous merger.
They total together, collectively: two.

She looked at them closely once, and found
that one is thin and one is round;
that brown eyes look green, but blue ones look blue.
The thin, turning-green one is like his mother.
The round, blue, different-sexed one is like the other.
The thin makes sense, the round one little;
the thin, when coerced, performs with his fiddle.
The round, dieting, whittles a more feminine middle.

That Oiivia has beautiful kids is not odd:
their male parent fancied himself a young god.

TO THE READER: I wrote this some time ago when I was in a different situation. I no longer have my station wagon. Since I broke its leg and had to have it (them?) shot I have destroyed two more cars and am now thinking about rolling my Mercury - also an ostentatious consumer - before I have to have spinal surgery done on it.

My thin one is now rounder; my round one is thinner. Both make sense, generally. The one no longer makes much music but he has helped make a baby which seems to him to be more important.

I now do little compulsive eating. My daughter says I once consumed eleven bananas in one evening, which she said she found impressive. She was too young then to know about Freud.

©1983 O.L. Anderson 


Olivia Anderson is a psychotherapist, poet, and playwright.  Her current work-in-progress is a play about a 70-year-old mortician.

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