by Adam Penna
What is a strip-mall but the ordinary dream of ordinary men,
But so too then the railroad and the other squares and vectors,
Projectiles, particles, bricks and ideas meant to contain
Our meager love and our extraordinary hatred.
Is it the other way around, I think, sometimes,
Until I see a grave untended in the forest overgrown.
And then I know. We shot out the headlights of a Volkswagen Bug.
It was abandoned and blown up. I was the best of them,
I thought, because their parents were divorced.
No one loved them enough. I couldn’t know enough
Would never be enough. I wanted all the love.
I wanted to be pinned to the earth by love. I didn’t want to die
But to expand out of myself and be drawn back inward,
To where the name my parents gave me had been nailed,
Hung crookedly still, as if a shingle blown off in a hurricane.
Our storms require new descriptive terms. The old ones
Don’t quite approach the magnitudes or adequately touch
The levels of destruction that are now. How quaint
The category 4, which lifted me as if by the scruff
Back then, and like a plaything tossed me round my childhood.
Adam Penna lives in a rich man’s house fronting a magic spring and on the edge of a murder gorge. He is a father to 6, and a husband to 1.
