THE MYSTERY TOSS
All the hums and buzzes of where I
begin the night,
all the still and flashing little red lights
telling me I exist
in an active evening imagination
I say the ant’s shadow
is beside mine.
But
I am now, will always be,
addict in the castle
during a year
when the cracks have been emptied
by a virus and lying politicians.
Such interference chasing the income
trying to be me,
none of it there when I am the witness
to winter’s brief sunsets,
it is like I have taken a clock
off its boring wall,
thrown it up into air lacking snow
nobody even wants.
Aloneness the real perfection, able to admire a dog’s barking
as I pass through the path I have
not only made but tread
due to the chase I mention often
and manage despite identities
now that I ready to turn sixty-three
I seem calm about for the first time.
But
may I introduce, “Big Boy”
relaxing up the street
on his favourite lower branch.
Big Boy has brought the latest addiction–
I cannot not see him and his mate
each day along with each daughter–
one wing up and one wing down
as he caches a beak full of four peanuts
on days we know to be early Spring.
But
there’s the mystery of a bed,
where does he sleep?
Where does all his family sleep?
Both questions leave me
staring at a handy puddle,
recognition of the answerless man.
How his steps adjust to the hill’s ice
is only what comes first after a shift
putting up with dangerous equipment
and a supposed manager unable
to adjust his daily need to criticize
after asking a new employee to
take the initiative and put away pallets,
what takes up the least amount of space.
And during the end of such a walk
toward the home he pays for
there is a stop, a place he places
a handful of dog-food, a handful
of unshelled peanuts, knowing in
the deepest parts of his body then
that there really is a soul able to
be weighted down by the walkers
he watches, and doesn’t wish to be
part of, trying to get by, being other
then what can no longer not be called
what most won’t say is a form of slavery.
What Big Boy sees us unable to escape,
watches me try to ask him for
any tiny bit, any type of freedom he has, he may drop, to be
the direction I really deserve.
But
remember, there’s the bed thing.
Where would he sleep?
Frustration actually turns to wonder
as the coin’s answer
finally lands in a gloveless hand
while the off-work sun arranges
a selection of white clouds,
begins to rhyme the frozen sky
with strokes of bright oranges.