Vic Chesnutt
My Last Act
Fill the basin with my hands
Your strong shoulders in my head
Soft soap splashing on the rim
I keep wishing I was him
Cobweb fluttering 12 feet up
Above the basin where I violently scrub
Can’t scrape away with soap and fingernails
Dirty imagined intimate details
I go to the garage where on the wall
A 1000 granddaddy long-legs crawl
A crazy notion cracks through my mind
An electric shudder shoots up and down my spine
I run to the kitchen grab a pot and lid
And I rush to the garage before I knew what I did
I was raking hundreds spiders into that pot
Then I was sitting at the kitchen table
Feeling so cold and so hot
In a moment I move to get a cereal bowl
Then I’m back at the table then before I know
What exactly I had done
I pulled the legs off every one
That mound of little round bodies in front of me
It looked like a bowl of black eyed peas
So I take them over to the countertop and poured it into the Cuisinart
I reached in the cupboard and I grabbed a fifth
Of tequila and I pour that in
Push the button and it starts to chop
My chest can hardly contain my thumping heart
My last act on this earth
Will be to chug-a-lug the mixture and hope for the worst