TOYS

Today I awoke with a detective’s calling;
More than any curiosity it fed off a single minded
Furled brow intensity
To find the few toys
That carried me Beyond my sadness as a child…
Sitting up in bed, in a different century,
I felt shriveled by a crunched diaphragm
And the irksome task of readying to wash and
Dress for a pay day which was already spent;
Weighed down with pasty lids, I half surrendered to,
Easing a convoluted trail of repetitive steps
Which I could safely bet would take me to
The usual cast of characters:
The wheezing bull faced man who sold
The morning tabloid
Or the giggling flock of Brooklyn girls who liberated every
afternoon
With thoughts of Friday on a 3 day weekend….
There was that green rubber Packard
I carried in my pocket
Like a talisman or totem of something
That would be built to scale
By the time I finished college.
Several marbles squeezed the satisfying friction
Of ball bearings flipping through my fingers;
Obsessing with and the one or two cat’s eyes
I won in early Spring,.
From Afciandos
Who felt the pain of losing luck they always counted on.
These stood as ramparts of a dream of certainty
That something even better might pop up
Into play that day:
Recruiting someone else’s finest cavalry
Or stores of ammunition coveted by my soldiers
Who sat down inside my Packard……
Toys should never be surrendered to younger cousins
As proofs which mothers engineer
To acknowledge some feeble evidence
Of a new found maturity.
Yet, even when I gave them up,
Mother seemed unable to say what
New things would take their place.
Nevertheless, informing me that by giving things away
I’d grow used to being lonely…
There were those lock-down years of flustering through French
Whose intent may have been to bludgeon all my thoughts of
happiness.
Algebra unleashed its onslaught in circles
With no inner prize
Along with triangles that only made their home on sheets of paper.
Oh, my rubber Packard taxied to another far away;
Made more real by the crunching sound of marbles in another’s
pocket
While I made a bee-line to a nightly bivouac
In someone’s unknown closed garage.

Ken Siegelman
Brooklyn Poet Laureate, March, 2009