Poetry Break #4 - Woolworths

I caught a glimpse of the child today.

A Frustration of reflections,

Dancing along the mirrored glass sides

Of steel horses sauntering on stone & asphalt

That gore at his feet as they steal past.

He is running alongside them now,

Looking for an escape,

A space to dart through

But his need goes unnoticed.

Questions unanswered

And Graces unaccounted for,

He has long stripped himself of himself

And left it there abandoned

At the curbside.

The road rises up to meet his feet,

In his hands - a ball

The world clutched to his 40 lb frame,

Bigger than he is and

Perched precariously above his snow-white shoulders.

He stops now.

He notices now.

He knows.

The child turns around to face me.

The traffic grinds to a halt;

Time (that infinite machine) grinds.

And the world stops turning in his hands,

Tips forward

And crashes to a fault.

The word is stripped from me now.

Laid bare, I am nothing but a hanging sentence.

With nothing more than

The memory of a reflection of a ghost.

His cold eyes reach up to mine now

From three feet off the ground.

Accusing,

Pointing,

Giggling impishly –

Giddy with the casual realization

That the child

Is me?

I am meditating upon

Klee’s ‘Scream’,

(Does the man scream because someone has stolen the words from his lips?

Or does he scream because he is ‘me’)

Its all too much for me to digest.

Its greater than the sum total of meaning.

To much to bear on these shoulders

(Too much; too bare - these shoulders)

For I long dropped the ball

And watched it crash,

On a stone and asphalt heart.

And Watched the child

Plucked up from this place.

High above the men and the steel horses,

Drifting, floating out of reach –

The child is lost.

The Child is lost.

No search parties assembled.

No army of angels dispatched.

Only an open grave

Hungrily waiting,

The (printer’s) devil adds another ‘S’ to the ‘child’s laughter’.

The devil adds another name to his ledger.