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.
