I treated myself to some Q-tips,
one thousand in rows upon rows –
just the thing I should take to the house by the lake
where, in summer, my family goes.
How delighted I was with my Q-tips,
hygienic, degradable, cheap,
and impeccably built to remove the lake’s silt
from my ears without going too deep.
I’d enjoyed five or six of the Q-tips,
so stemlike, so sleek, so refined,
when one day as I swam, a thought landed, kerblam,
in the muck of my horrified mind:
At the rate I was using up Q-tips –
one a night for two weeks of vacay –
I’d need seventy years of unclogging my ears
till I threw the last Q-tip away.
Now, whenever I look at those Q-tips
in their box, each a cotton-clad bone,
I imagine who’ll choose them and carelessly use them
once I’m in a box of my own.