still thinking

she said:
     colorful, adventurous!
and:
     abandoned, forgotten!
and:
     waiting....

then she went quiet as clouds
before:

     still thinking...

i would play with my toys
the same manner in which thunder
storms played with the fears of
dogs.

nothing escaped my
incessant desire to see what
could be turned out when in;
i come with litanies of apologies.

the things purchased by
my parents i laved in mud-
water and tossed against
trees.

as if what was new was something
of a suspect promise and needed to be
put to a mythic test at the hands of
a Pagan, rock-throwing Jentil like me.

they came polished and packaged,
pure as the soul of a newborn;
tidy, and there is a waiting lie in something
so pasteurized.

she said:
     colorful, adventurous!
and:
     abandoned, forgotten!
and:
     waiting....

then she went quiet as clouds
before:

     still thinking...

we had a flea market a mile
from my grandparent's home
and Pappy would take us
young cousins on saturdays.

he made a promise that
he kept: something under a buck
and it's yours, so we
picked over long, weathered

picnic tables that were
daisy-chained together down the
length of the side of the road
by the old shoe factory.

other people's shit
Pappy would growl,
but he always came away with
something.

and so did we: malfunctioning
jack knives or chipped
Budweiser shot glasses
or a dented Boy Scout canteen.

i once came away with
a tin toy that had been handled
so much by some past child
that the paint was ghostly

and the figure of it so
abused that it was difficult
to tell what the toy had been
in its virgin state.

i took it home and
placed it on my bureau
and no one was allowed to
touch it; i ached for its broken story.

it had been played out,
its story caught in the
fingerprints of age and time,
it sang a truth.

i have a lover who sits in
a coverlet of longing,
thinking back upon whatever
it was, now that it is now was.

she thinks:
     colorful, adventurous!
and:
     abandoned, forgotten!
and:
     waiting....

then she goes quiet as clouds
before:

     still thinking...