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Ancient Artifact
for every time you failed to come through
you should have broken your pinky
because promises mean nothing
if you don't lose something in return
but you didn't
you gained and gained and gained
maybe that's why i'm unafraid
of broken pinkies too
my heels dig into the dirt
elbow up, eyes ahead
watch her hands
count the wind-up
first, second, third, then home
first, second, third, then home is all i have to go
breathe
play through the pain
run even as her fastball hits you in the gut
and you trip along the bases
and bruise your ribs dodging a tag out
wince and you're benched
fail and you're done
freeze and the crowd of eyes watching will all know what you've been told before
useless
pathetic
I'm a let down
The one that's always a setback
and yeah I'm pretty lonely
but that's the thing about love
"I suck at this"
I tell myself
(This is the part where you say no, you don't)
I would sing a song
but I have no words
I would hum a tune
but I have no melody
success
like grains of brown sand
at the sea-shore
slips through my nerveless fingers
the world
has not time
even to laugh.
The snow has ceased its fluttering flight,
The wind sunk to a whisper light,
An ominous stillness fills the night,
A pause--a hush.
At last, a sound that breaks the spell,
Loud, clanging mouthings of a bell,
That through the silence peal and swell,
And roll, and rush.
What does this brazen tongue declare,
That falling on the midnight air
Brings to my heart a sense of care
Akin to fright?
'Tis telling that the year is dead,
The New Year come, the Old Year fled,
Another leaf before me spread
On which to write.
When in the mines of dark and silent thought
Sometimes I delve and find strange fancies there,
With heavy labour to the surface brought
That lie and mock me in the brighter air,
Poor ores from starved lodes of poverty,
Unfit for working or to be refined,
That in the darkness cheat the miner's eye,
I turn away from that base cave, the mind.
Yet had I but the power to crush the stone
There are strange metals hid in flakes therein,
Each flake a spark sole-hidden and alone,
That only cunning toilsome chemists win.
All this I know and yet my chemistry
Fails and the pregnant treasures useless lie.
Jonas Keene thought his lot a hard one
Because his children were all failures.
But I know of a fate more trying than that:
It is to be a failure while your children are successes.
For I raised a brood of eagles
Who flew away at last, leaving me
A crow on the abandoned bough.
Then, with the ambition to prefix
Honorable to my name,
And thus to win my children’s admiration,
I ran for County Superintendent of Schools,
Spending my accumulations to win—and lost.
That fall my daughter received first prize in Paris
For her picture, entitled, “The Old Mill”—
(It was of the water mill before Henry Wilkin put in steam.)
The feeling that I was not worthy of her finished me.
From Bindle’s opera house in the village
To Broadway is a great step.
But I tried to take it, my ambition fired
When sixteen years of age,
Seeing “East Lynne,” played here in the village
By Ralph Barrett, the coming
Romantic actor, who enthralled my soul.
True, I trailed back home, a broken failure,
When Ralph disappeared in New York,
Leaving me alone in the city—
But life broke him also.
In all this place of silence
There are no kindred spirits.
How I wish Duse could stand amid the pathos
Of these quiet fields
And read these words.
My parents thought that I would be
As great as Edison or greater:
For as a boy I made balloons
And wondrous kites and toys with clocks
And little engines with tracks to run on
And telephones of cans and thread.
I played the cornet and painted pictures,
Modeled in clay and took the part
Of the villain in the “Octoroon.”
But then at twenty-one I married
And had to live, and so, to live
I learned the trade of making watches
And kept the jewelry store on the square,
Thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking,—
Not of business, but of the engine
I studied the calculus to build.