The Experts

By Olivia Somes

Don’t you dare turn your pizza
crust into a boomerang, fling
a toothpaste cap into the vast ocean,
create a crater in your box spring
to store old pictures of your pompadour
and the girlfriend you can’t quite shake,
or pummel a good piece of kiwi
with your car keys because
that last piece of fuzz
just wouldn’t budge
The experts say
life’s better in the knitted coil
of your grandmother’s socks,
never in the smoking section
never four hours before bed
never without an adult present
never without a touch of mint oil.
Remember back
when your teeth came out like
dandruff flakes, and you tied
your last stubborn tooth
to a doorknob so you’d
score sixty more cents
to buy more Abba Zabba
and offset the ruin of your next batch
—that’s the cornerstone
of being—a little recklessness,
a little strange—trampoline mishaps,
art decos of mangled electric shavers,
catapulting doop tudes into
the principal’s office.
Nowadays you can’t go a week
without some know-it-all accusing
you of bad taste, without the boss
mingling by the punch clock
ten minutes before anyone’s
even late like no one’s ever
crashed in the carpool lane
trying to smash a stowaway spider
with a piece of coffee cake.
Someday the experts
will claim that Slankets
are too dangerous for the arms,
accuse the soil
of being too full of mud,
call the old experts mere
amateurs instructing
folks how to eat caviar
on paper plates.