December 21, 2013Christmas Canner
I sat somewhere in the ’70s
at a mall booth between Hot Dog on a Stick
and Spencer Gifts. Instead of boxing presents,
I canned them: the packaging equivalent of a poem.
For most bourgeois hearts, I would press
a rugby shirt or bell bottom
jumpsuit or elephant pants
into a coffee can.
Nothing epic until a man asked me
to condense a fur coat for his wife.
I was so fourteen years old,
a boy performing something utterly weird
without irony,
cramming against unforgivingness, the weighing
down and dull
balling into a depression.
It is how one troubles one’s way through puberty alone,
boy to man, all those tried-on selves like
thirty-five former minks
reshaped into a gallon. I miss
my childhood’s
burnt-orange room with bamboo beads—
the happy sound of rain
every time I’d enter or leave.
from #40 - Summer 2013