pith…

There are no camels in this combo crèche,
formed in Singapore, assembled in Malaysia.
The pieces, each in its place, dominate the living
room, diverting our path to where we cleanse

and empty and keep my store-bought teeth,
neither sneer nor smile in their snap-tight cup.
The lone cow’s head is broken, decapitated
last season, lost in the vacuum or the latest

effort to gather what mattered yesterday.
The wise men made off with the Barbies
on My Pretty Ponies. Mother Mary buries
myrrh and secrets beneath a rigid chicken.

Cuckold Joe measures the price of shame
by the size of his deductions. The Messiah,
in steep need of bowel relief, is inconsolable
in his ceramic straw suit. He’s a baby, after all,

a baby gone angry with action-grip hands.
Any character that crawls across the carpet
is split at the jointed hip, fractured before seizing
the headless torso of the sole man doll, broken down

across the burro’s back, loaded down as beasts will be.
Nobody is borne here, really, nor gifts given
wholly, attached to hands as they are in the factory
plastic mold. Neither sheep nor shepherd will be
the same tomorrow, reassembled as each must be.

.

joesmith

from the way the world comes in, a collection of pieces from the last 20 years.BUY IT HERE please. Thank you.

This work by joesmith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.