Warble

 
[i]
In this, the smallest, least consequential, nothing.  
Here, in the solitary confinement of the lull  
and in the dull hard-fascinating light    
is a box.  
It is bombarded by the colour of poverty,  
by the colour of idleness, by the bland whiteness of the scenery,  
by the similarity of my skin, by the disparity of my soul.  
It is in the nightness dripping, it is in the screaming at offspring,  
it is in the inability to read bills but the ability to preach sermons,  
it is in the ignorance, the intolerance, the brazen hand-me-down of hatred,  
it is in the definition of normal, it is in the following of the well-adjusted reports.  
It is liquidized in the sensitive skillet of my stomach. It is reconfirmed on a re-return up the throat canal and it is a box.  
   
[ii]
A box that would sit in the cellar of the words that wouldn't be said to parents,  
to grandparents, to work place myriads of the people that would like to be.    
A box that would smell of vomit, and raw eggs post-maggots, and an unsavoury tongue or armpit or groin, and a death in the apartment next door that a person may notice but not question.  
A box that would hold professed privilege, idle entitlement, of greater pastures, of looking down and looking up  
rather than looking in front at who  
holds the cards of destiny, of youthful tiredness and desensitized age, of bitterness, of cruelty,  
of empty cups filled with unusable compassion, of facades made of cardboard that collapse under strong weather,  
of cardboard wives and cardboard men who have lost all sense of engagement and thrill, of quiet homes packed together like sardines,  
of play, of safety, of love, and it sits.  
 
[iii]   
In the adjoining bricks, houses a woman and her offspring  
and her worn dog, and her ill-painted mentality. In the bricks  
of my mother home, where the doors flung open to flat grassy-verges, where the town was a town and was easily exited,  
where the young adults were checked out  
and the adults with them, where the fingers seemed to be in no pie  
rather than too many,  
laid confidence and creativity and castles crumbling built on crippled childhoods.  
In the doors of my mother home, there was a love, to be free and to be heavy-handed and to be fresh and to be fucked  
and to drag yourself together for Monday morning  
with no feelings of shame. The secrets  
are in these houses now and here,  
squashed beneath the litter in the bog soil, hammered above the rows and rows of produce  
and packaging and protections, surrounded by false history, a barely working history,  
a hazardous industrialized history  
craving escape.  
 
[iv]   
The wonderment grows weak  
watching and fades  
under too little sustained interest and too much difficulty juggling the elevation of human consumption  
and the existence of being content in one's self.  
It crawls into a ball  
and shudders at the future of a cage and a key  
separated by blood and bone, by the ability of others to sensor one's feelings  
for public feeding and fear,  
by the change, by the similarity, by the condition.  
The wonderment sleeps,  
spent, unlikely to wake.