Grammaticaster

I have been rolled into this dim corner, and
from this vantage point, can survey
my haphazardly scattered, neglected friends –
relics from yesteryears strewn, broken and forgotten.

 

Sometimes the sunlight filters through
the dusty window glass,
illuminating the corpses of castaways
in this little-lost-toy room
like a littered battlefield.

 

I turn away from my only companion –
a pale baby’s fist long-severed
from its lifeless, plastic body.
It mocks me – its filthy digits
only cruel imitations of the little girl’s
soft, warm hands that held me,
bounced me, shared me in ancient summer afternoons.

 

You wouldn’t think it to look at me now –
a sad, limp, calloused and deflated
pink blob clad in thin cobwebs –
but I used to shine a brilliant scarlet –
proud, vigorous, loved.  But, see,

 

childhood innocence is fleeting.
Little girls grow up and venture out
into the reality of the wild, vicious world.
We are bartered away,
casualties of adolescence.

 

Now, year on year,
I can only gloomily ponder
these pathetic, plastic fingers at my side –
imperfect reminders of how things were
and will never be again.

 January 2005

Onwards

Strangers’ eyes lock and apologize to each other
wordlessly, beneath the “hi.”  Jackets swoosh on,
hurrying the struggling grass.

Kindness is a reflection in a plastic glass
floating inside muddy eddies under bridges – fog shrouded,
submerging, submitting, malnourished.

A pinky finger is tracing mindless highways out
in the pepper-strewn styrofoam salt flats:
a purple sparkle bulldozer.

Out on the sidewalk, one of the uncounted objectors
spills exhausted examples of lost love-strewn language:
“Dodge with me this verbal minefield – I can be

your flimsy, fleshy human shield;  blind until the broken sky
allows us daylight, free until my words are cut down –
deflated fruit from a twig-thin tree.

Trust me or at least pretend I have no fractured,
promised past; no silly, stuttered words to rend.
Laugh me on my wistful way.”

There is a word to describe this pedestrian process, but
little silicon threads are the only linguists left;
their flowing electric signals – the only ministers.

From Spring 2005.

Okay, I’ll admit it.  I’m phoning this one in tonight.  It’s late.  I’m tired.  This poem is from early 2005, I think.

Destinations

 

There is nothing more to write; to say.
I’ve watched the streetlamps recede toward darkened highways;
listening to the drumming rattle of sidewalk artists
beating out tribal war chants that have become
meaningless trivia set to awkward music,
their voices – shallow, spilling hollow sounds.

 

The bonfires have all but winked out;
I see my withered hands dance in the artificial light,
I see them and don’t believe in them anymore.
Contentment curls human beings like these elderly fists:
little repression mechanisms sputtering out listlessly
behind antiseptic partitions and flickering spreadsheets.

 

My hands dance because that is what they do,
what they’ve always done – what’s expected.
Beyond the tunnel I’ve seen the devil, neglected
and beautiful, primping his useless wings like a parakeet.
Out on the lawn, the flags hang like candle wax –
clinging lifelessly in the stale industry air.

 

I am as aimless as these old pathways –
little fake geometric patterns that lead nowhere;
an engineer’s grand illusion of function, gone awry.
I walk along them from point to point,
pointlessly meandering through muddy miracles
of pulverized leaves and starving blades of grass.