Sometimes quiet wins
The battle for your thoughts.
And the bills are paid,
The dog is walked,
The grandmother called.
Everything could be worse.

Sometimes you push open the doors of the casino
With all the noise and the lights behind you
And the old ladies, crouched over the levers.
You’re ahead, even if by only a few bucks.
As your skin greets the cool of the evening,
The stars loiter above.

I run my fingers through my hair.
Still there.
Listen to the books sleeping,
Watch the cars on the highway below,
And don’t wonder for a moment
What it would be like to fall.

Tomorrow will bring bad news,
Or an ache never thought of,
A bill you couldn’t expect.
The rough world will always
Inhale deeply and cry out to you.
Though maybe not this time.

Everything in its place,
Or maybe the trash
Where it will be drained
Maybe tragically
Of purpose.
The plaything of rats
And millennia of decay.

Hundreds of wingnuts
(and myriad bolts which seem inexplicably to not fit them)
Padocks forever clenched,
Combinations maybe written on a notepaper
In a distant school
in a far away grade
By children who are ours only in that they once were.

And brads – we keep brads
Not having the kind of art hung with much more
This might have held a terrible print
Or a framed work of art
By a fifth-grader who now is learning to drive.
It doesn’t have the paint or the canvas
Only the plaster from which
It was ripped.

The batteries and the extra screwdrivers
Are easy to sort out.
The tape seems to have ensnared
Hundreds of tiny screws and paperclips
The dirt of the garage floor.
And maybe the glitter from that
Halloween when she was a princess
Or an 80s glam rocker.

How do we sort that out?

Do we keep the extra bulbs for the Christmas light string
(have we ever replaced a bulb?
Or do we just plan to,
Standing in the aisle,
Buying new sets, three-for-two)
And if we don’t – keep them – do we lose the
Tree and gifts and the pleasure we shared
Watching the kids
Open gifts we couldn’t afford,
Whose spare parts litter the floor in front of us.

It all fades away and someday,
You shudder to think,
Is gone. And your child or a stranger will
Sweep the concrete, throw away the extra blades
And the vast supply of cheap pens
Into reinforced, black 30-gallon trash bags.
Along with empty film canisters which
Held what you or at least your grandparents
Thought were memories.

But we are memories.
And the garage needs to be sorted.