SENTIMENTAL ADDICTION

Sentimental Addiction

Not a sage alternative to cigarettes--

your spit and Skoal mix in a Starbucks’ cup.

Is  your white matter high?

Brown saliva and tobacco,  

battered pine cone, sap

dangling from one corner of your mouth.

I contemplate deference.

Broken lath and broken stone; one heart hung low.

Yellow wires threaded through support beams--

calloused hands barely reach to decorate the

basement ceiling , a soldered red star,

the lines of power  

ruffle nerves abolished on electric wires.

Still can’t reach the tippy top.

Holiday canister fills in as steps,

(gingerly packed last December) work-boot

prints a stranger’s history;

a grown man stands on a child’s memories;

not dead yet not alive.

Battered and abandoned are

disregarded Christmas adoration—

slivers of tinsel, confetti of silver

inlaid in a basement of soot and dirt. 

A new key, a new lock,

an old house

ransacked and scolded by souls

who don’t inhabit or celebrate

the warmth of her hollow heart.