Once framed
I am filling a room with all the things you left behind,
pieces of you that you felt you could carry without badge-proof.
Books you have memorized, tiny light machines,
paint brushes you can manipulate from 300 miles away.
I am filling a room with street-finds,
portraits of the family you swore you could live without, the places you came from
and discarded only to prove you could.
Guitars without strings, boxes of 45s played out in a previous life--
we filled a house with one man's garbage, turned it to treasure,
became archivists of ropes and tethers,
ties we can shake - but the marks of tightened twine
remain. We dress ourselves
in your grandmother's clothes, hold your family
to our chest because we know what it is to be left curbside, slave to the tide,
pushed out to a polluted sea (making snorkels with slurpee straws, fins with
cardboard pizza boxes, making the best of it).
pieces of you that you felt you could carry without badge-proof.
Books you have memorized, tiny light machines,
paint brushes you can manipulate from 300 miles away.
I am filling a room with street-finds,
portraits of the family you swore you could live without, the places you came from
and discarded only to prove you could.
Guitars without strings, boxes of 45s played out in a previous life--
we filled a house with one man's garbage, turned it to treasure,
became archivists of ropes and tethers,
ties we can shake - but the marks of tightened twine
remain. We dress ourselves
in your grandmother's clothes, hold your family
to our chest because we know what it is to be left curbside, slave to the tide,
pushed out to a polluted sea (making snorkels with slurpee straws, fins with
cardboard pizza boxes, making the best of it).