Bitter Buttons

Bitter buttons and crooked corners.

Scrapbooks slathered in regret and remorse.

Spider cracks along the laugh lines and cockroach coughs.

Lemon drops. Apple pops. Grape gravy. Plum aspic.

Pruning my plum and lowering his raisin.

Sun kissed and moon slapped; whipping up a froth of metallic whiskers.

A band plays corncob harmonicas with odes to muskrats and kittens.

A crown of thorns and a throne of beige snow.

Long johns pulled down market by a Macaw named Fresca.

Fuzzy peaches envying sleek melons thumped with pride.

Foul language and fowl words aped by a choir of parrots.

Some Notch Along the Curled Road

Which remnants of the journey
do we choose to revere and which
will we try to push aside with the
hope that they will decay and dissolve?
Despite our best efforts, the ugliness
of expired passion will never disappear.
It will return, perhaps in the guise of the drunk relative
always arriving early and being told to leave the party.
At best they are recycled, warped
and distorted and carried forward for
our next dash on the treadmill of dysfunction.
Looking into the next pair of eyes,
the broken windshield of regretful journeys
reveals the road ahead that we could drive blindly.
We can do our level best to strangle
this latest epiphany until the next oncoming collision.
Mired and wired by cold realizations
and blanketed regrets, what we've escaped always
welcomes us back to its musty, familiar den.
Many new routes are awaiting that will collect this debris,
deny its provenance, embrace it
and then resent it. Each can ignite new passions
and obscure loss. But the tug is always there of
the hope of your father standing at the edge of
the garage door, a baseball mitt in hand
and a never realized dream he dares you to catch

(Words - Junk Thief 2010; Images - Gregg Biggs May 1977)