In the Basement

Things collected wait below me,

wanted & unwanted,

trash with treasure, 

much of it treasured trash.

There's been talk of gathering stardust,

but this dust just gathers over the waste 

of our hidden space & runaway time. 

Words stick together in forgotten books:

shelved, boxed, stacked, & falling. 

Photographs bend and frames break. 

A cheap print of Brady's Whitman sits double matted 

but unframed near a copy of Hungry Mind Review, 

inked by A.G. (11/5/94), a generous gift from years ago. 

A broken-backed & illustrated Treasure Island 

loses its color & tells its age in rings near several 

copies of Call of the Wild that won't survive long. 

Slumped in a stolen milk crate near The Eagles & The Cars, 

my first garage sale purchase (at eleven), 

a fifty cent copy of 52nd Street shows the warp of a collector's life, it's mine. 

I won't describe the boots & cleats & sneakers chucked in boxes, 

or the mountains of camping gear & sleeping bags left waiting, 

but I did count five different locations for baseball cards. 

But it's the toys I am most worried about as they conspire to save one another. 

They pile together as boredom condemns them to boxes & tubs. 

Occasionally, I swear I can hear them crying for help. 

Too much of a life is spent gathering dust like interest or the loss of it. 

This is not the sum of a life, but it adds up to quite the remainder. 

Something more than this poem must be done.