Picturing home
Two perfect shuttered windows
Green, yellow, in an irish motif
Classically open with the sunshine
A red roof
Balconies stretch out
Calling you to relax
Painting thoughts within this style
A porch for picnics
Windows expose magnificent craftsmanship
Warm picturesque settings
A hum to ease all worries and cares
Extinguishing matches
I’m afraid to put the match out on my tongue
Red headed, wooden, beautifully made,
A perfect survivor
A life line to living rooms
This plank in the gullies
My friends and I would strike matches on garage floors
Just to light them and hold the danger in our tiny hands
Boxes of matches made useless by ignorant boys
Nobody cared about their need
Nobody understood dark forests and pathways
Where the small flame leads you
Too fun, too crazy
Fires are summer survival
Shaping your adolescent perspective
My friends and I lit entire books
Watching them explode
Watching the fire shrink to a tiny, singular bulb
Which the brave picked up and extinguished on a tongue
Convincing my lap shade
I try to bargain with her
Promise tomorrow night to be later
But right now
we both need to be energy efficient
and I can see how this statement cuts
like a circuit breaker
into her bulb
one more hour
I can’t say no
Even when you don’t light
my best interests
and the bills get expensive
I can’t say no to her attitudeJ.Donnelly lives and writes in Astoria, NY. His chapbook is called The ECW.
No comments:
Post a Comment