New at IWP Books: Phyllis McGinley, 1959, A Pocketful of Wry.

Inventors, Keep Away From My Door

Ah, where’s the patented device
 That I can learn to master?
My icebox yields me melted ice,
 My oven, but disaster.
From stranded cars it is my fate
 To view the rural scenery;
For I’m the poor unfortunate
 Undone by all machinery.

Other people’s robots keep a willing head up.
 All their cheerful keyholes welcome in the key.
Other people’s toasters do not burn their bread up.
 But nothing ever works for me.

The gadgets come, the gadgets go,
 Ambitious for the attic.
Tune up my stubborn radio —
 It screams with rage and static.
The vacuum sweeper roundabout
 With slippery strength encoils me.
Locks treacherously lock me out.
 The simple corkscrew foils me.

Other people’s mousetraps sometimes bring a mouse down.
 Other people’s furnaces sing in cozy glee.
Mine huffs and it puffs till it brings the quaking house down.
 Nothing ever runs for me.

The humblest tools in my abode
 Know half a hundred ruses
To leak or sputter or explode,
 Catch fire or short their fuses.
In all things made of steel or wire,
 Inanimate, unholy,
There lurks some dark, ancestral ire
 Directed at me, solely;
There lurks some black, malicious spite
 Amid the wheels and prisms,
And what shall save me from the might
 Of wrathful mechanisms?

Other people’s watches do not send them late for
 Amorous appointment or literary tea.
Other people’s telephones bring the word they wait for.
 But nothing ever works for me.