When Ends Meet

I went into the kitchen,
to make myself a sandwich,
Only to find,
A rolled up plastic bag
with two familiar shapes inside:
No one ever wants the crusts,
And there are always two,
Abandoned at the bottom
of every twisted sheath of cellophane.

Even though they were just as kneaded,
in the very beginning
as the rest of the loaf:
To avarice children,
With dirty hands,
It’s as if they’re not really bread;
nothing more than stale book ends
to push aside,
in pursuit of a flawless row,
of perfectly cut portions.

I stared at them for a moment,
and felt so sorry for them;
Alpha and Omega
Facing each other,
Little bare backs
Exposed and tanned.
And made myself a sandwich.

Lunch Break

I watch the sparrows,
Scavenging around the tires of parked cars
For the crumbs of careless humans.
Or a colony of lost bugs,
Led across an asphalt desert,
by a wingless Moses.

Prurient wind,
Pulling on the skirts of women
passing by.
Forcing them,
to hold their summer dresses,
against their hips and thighs

Out Of The Way

A night filled room, exhumed
by the songs of morning birds,
pick away the darkness all around me
Until I begin to see,
Some pencil drawn trees,
On a grey tablet sky,
Opened up on cardboard feet.

She came by,
To help me get ready,
with a coat and tie I had never worn,
Stuffing in the maple twirls, acorns
Shaking her head and saying,
it was time
for me to know the Lord.

Lumpy white socks,
conceal the roots,
coiled around the bottom of my soiled feet,
pulling me along the winter street
with the string of souls,
To knit and purl the front row.

The reverend spoke of a boy,
Who perished on a tree,
I wondered to myself if the carpenter’s son,
Had hewn the poles himself,
with drawknife and spade;
how cruel it must have been,
had no one told him.
He would die on the very cross
he made.

People stood to speak in tongues
with esoteric words.
She held my hand and smiled at me
Thinking I agreed,
god would speak to us,
with such ambiguity.

It felt so sad to let her go
Because I understood,
The difference between the pew’s veneer
and the feel of living wood.

When I walk beneath Cathedral limbs,
where all things move with ease,
and Jehovah whispers his Pentecostal hymns,
Through the boughs of evergreen trees.