Should I do the dishes or write a poem?

[Lizzie]

More people will eat off my dishes than will read my poems.
The kitchen smells

like last night's dinner was left out in the Arizona sun
for 3 days,

and possibly 3 nights – the smell is Biblical.
Time, organic material, and heat:

a holy trinity of stench. But, my poetry stinks too,
so that's a wash.

Doing dishes is Sisyphean: the same dirty dishes,
the same soap –

sponge, sink, window,
water-logged belly

(versus the same melancholy thoughts, dark cast,
washed-up themes?).

Transparent and thin, my ideas bubble up, then vaporize.
Dishes win, dammit.