.
CHRISTMAS AT THE ORPHANAGE
But if they’d give us toys and twice the stuff most
parents splurge on the average kid, orphans, I submit, need more than enough;
in fact, stacks wrapped with our names nearly hid
the tree: these sparkling allotments yearly
guaranteed a lack of–what?–family?–
I knew exactly what it was I missed as we were lined up number rank and file:
to share my pals’ tearing open their piles
meant sealing the self, the child that wanted
to scream at all You stole those gifts from me;
whose birthday is worth such words? The wish-lists
they’d made us write out in May lay granted
against starred branches. I said I’m sorry.
.
.
.
2 FUTILISTS
Even if the mountain I climbed
Proved to be merely a duncecap It
was only on gaining its peak
That that knowledge reached me.
Is there a single inch–
one square millimeter
on the face of our planet
which some animal
human or otherwise
has not shit on?
Is there anywhere even a
pore’s-worth of ground–
earth that has never
(not once in its eons)
been covered by what
golgotha of dung?
If such a place exists,
I want to go there
and stand there
at that site
in that spot, truly
and purely for an instant.
.
.
.
THE HUNGER
If a path to the Gingerbread House
could be established by breaking crumbs
off its edifice and sprinkling them
so as to find what lies behind us
across the featureless fairytale
void of childhood: yet how very quick
that trick wears out when the story’s track
takes hold, takes toll, a far-older trail
prevails, we’re forced to give up this lost
cause; and the fact is that every last
morsel was gone long before the you
or I might totter our way back here
to try to dissuade all these other
Hansel-Gretels hollering in queue.
.
.
.
STRESS THERAPY
Time, time, time, time, the clock
vaccinates us.
and then even that lacks
prophylaxis.
Ticktock-pockmarked, stricken
by such strokes, we
get sick of prescriptions
which work solely
on the body.
Systole diastole–
It is by its very
intermittency
that the heart knows
itself to be an I.
.
© 1995 by Bill Knott
from
The Quicken Tree
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