Bed Bedlam

Image borrowed from Yahoo

Bed Bedlam

Spending over a thousand bucks
for a box spring and mattress, always
pisses me off, every decade or so--
even though my bulk has created
a form-fitting crevice on my side
and everything rolls to the center;
even as back and neck aches are
much too morning prevalent, even
when informercials late at night
show blow-up photos of the dreaded
dust mites that gorge themselves
on my constantly shedding skin cells,
after flipping the mattress 57 times
every which way to find the level--
and then there is the eternal quandary
about “which” mattress to buy,
a waterbed or the sleep-number mattress,
or the bowling ball mattress, or the one
with the wine glass that will not spill
as a child leaps up and down beside it?

For God’s sake, this is not Henry VIII’s spacious
canopy bed, or Gauguin’s panda ma palm mattress,
or Cleopatra’s goose-down love nest complete
with cheeta-skin pillow cases, or Andy Warhol’s
Campbell Soup-shaped bed, or Jackie Gleason’s
huge perfectly round bed, or Winston Churchill’s
bulldog-shaped day bed, or Bill Clinton’s
cigar-shaped napper--and besides, these nights
my wife and I spend more time sleeping in our
respective recliners than in the conjugal wrestling mat
center piece in our bedroom
anyway.

Glenn Buttkus

January 2011

Posted over on Applehouse Poetry

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