have sieved the
ruins of discarded
things,
sometimes finding
on an old magazine,
pictures of women,
looking through you
with ageless eyes
block square keys of
a typewriter,
cardboard covers
of fragile messages,
images of shattering
glass,
empty bottles of
RAT POISON,
‘Kamasutra for beginners'
‘The lonely wife’
other clandestine
books, sometimes,
extracted from some
secret wardrobe chamber,
wrapped in brown paper
school notebooks with
red tick-marks, blots, rights,
wrongs, devastating
stories of marks, homework,
a light bulb that still works,
the legs of a chair,
toy horses, toy cars,
scratched plastic
gaping holes in mugs, buckets,
fake notes from a crumpled game
of monopoly,
a dead dog's collar, a heavy rusted screw,
every night in my dreams,
they come hopping over a barn,
now you know,
that I do not count sheep
#
(This poem was first published in the Jan-Feb 2012 issue of Reading Hour Magazine.)
