Your chipped tooth;
one long night
smoke and drink
ended
with your face
jarred by concrete.
Enamel pulverized
into particulate.
A cassette case;
once your favorite.
You rode your bike
to buy it when it came out.
listened to it twelve times straight.
Now cracked and dusty
in the forgotten corner
of the garage.
Your G.I. Joe;
you begged mom to have it.
With his backpack of weapons
he turned colors in the sun,
a magic trick to the neighborhood kids.
He's in the old toy box,
hips displaced,
color faded.
What makes us
is an assemblage of
broken things,
not for what they are,
but for what they meant.
For what they mean.
4 comments:
th.is is NOT an idiom poem, but it works with my other poems about "things"
I think most of your audience can really relate to this poem. It's the specificity in your images that resonate with me as a reader: this is something I've always admired most in your poetry. I can't help but think back to that Cobra Commander action figure I begged my mom for before my seventh birthday, or that picture of Optimus Prime I forced my older brother's friend to draw for me with my tears. It all meant so much to me at the time, and the memory still resonates to this day. The fact that it doesn't go away, and instead is redefined, is captured in your final line wonderfully.
You passed the century mark, bud! Congratulations! Will you be revisiting and revising your old posts now? Or you still prefer generating new material?
I can definitely relate to all the images you present here considering I have chipped my front tooth several times and I always wanted Zartan but never got him. I like how the stanzas work as a time machine in that the first stanza happens later than the two stanzas that follow. This effect really shows off how broken things stick with us and it's something that perpetuates throughout life no matter what it is.
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