December 14, 2012Property
All I own fits in a box & a bag.
All I have loved engages the rage of rockets
blown bright &
quivering back as dust,
the scattering, descent & darkness.
For want of a dollar I’d insert one poem
into a vending machine for peanuts:
the mechanism
washes it back as counterfeit.
How would it be to possess an interest in the sun,
a lien on my lover’s breast, a trove of what bonds
best mature like words of light & warmth
against the blank, blurry skin of winter’s page?
Law books call it Blackacre, some hypothetical
property that can be bought or sold for a peppercorn.
It has its rules—so many, a litany of the possible,
gospel of ownership.
Oh,
to profit from such fiction …
I must give back my tee shirts, underwear & socks.
My belt shall tie pants to a stranger’s waist.
I hold my plot in the family field,
a black acre.
Otherwise, it’s just the sound of rain on remembered rooftops;
nostalgia for clowns & shopping malls,
lost pets, spontaneous laughter &
eavesdroppings splattered on the unrecorded past.
There’s so much nothing in the world: a man can’t even own that
without acquiring something in the loss.