Begrudgment: Beer and the Roomba

To think you're still maintaining that old score
as if you were bartending, and my tab
was full of unpaid drinks. I swear you're like
a Roomba swooping round a polished floor
in search of any strand of lint to grab,
or vultures waiting for a car to strike

some sorry squirrel. Justice is on strike,
you mutter, while your heavy hand is scoring
gouges in the tabletop. I grab
another can of beer and pull the tab
and foam pours out and soaks the vinyl flooring
like the Red Sea drowning Pharoah. Like--

oh, who cares what the hell this beer is like?
Its sole importance is as one more strike
against me. Get the mop out, scrub the floor
and put it all down on my growing score.
You know I'll never live to pay this tab,
you'll have to settle for what you can grab:

unsatisfactory, I'm sure. It grabs
me, though I doubt it's to your liking,
that I should dodge the arrows, slings and stabs
of vast, outrageous fortune's random striking
and exit, leaving this unsettled score,
a steaming pile of grudge upon the floor

of your neat parlor. Truly, I was floored
to find you hadn't let it go. You grab
on tight, I'll say-- but brittle as unscored
Saltines. Rigidity is fragile, like
a glass that shatters at the slightest strike
where metal bends, a curling beer-can tab

for instance. Press the Roomba's power-tab,
the mindless thing will circle round the floor
and never think that it should go on strike
for higher wages. Robots never grab
from other robots just because they like
to. Humans are the ones who must keep score.

You had to grab the mike, so take the floor
and call the strikes and runs just as you like.
There's no-one keeping tabs or taking score.


Collection available! Knocking from Inside