Head Handed
BY BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY
Stop belonging to me so much, face-head.
Leave me to my child and my flowers.
I can't run with you hanging on to me like that.
It's like having ten dogs on a single lead
and no talent for creatures.
No hands, no trees. Not my dogs, nobody's.
Don't you have a place to go, face-head?
Deep into the brick basement of another life?
To kill some time, I mean. That furnace
light could take a shine to you.
There are always places, none of them mine.
And always time—rainbow sugar show
of jimmies falling from ice cream's sky—
but that stuff's extra, it's never in supply.
"Never," however, acres of it. Violet beans
and sarcasm. Too many flavors of it.
All those prodigal particles,
flimsily whimsical miracles, an embarrassment
of glitches. The chorus just more us.
But nowhere bare and slippery have I
got a prayer. If I had two hands
to rub together I wouldn't waste the air.
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