Dear Hanging Shoes

Objects of my veneration: humbled each day
By you in prayerful meditation.
Are you a young man’s heart-beating toss to impress a fresh sweetheart?
Or, are you flung by a bully? And did you fight him back?
Are you a parachuted twisting hurrah of a much-needed good grade?
Or, the consummation of a young man’s celebration on his last day of school?
Are you a cenotaph of some tight-rope walker’s defeat?
Or, did you fall from an angel’s wings on his way to work?

Like my own children’s bronzed first shoes:
Contemplative icons;
Dangling on my street, in front of my house.

There is a Room Somewhere With God’s Head In It

With a trash pile of eye sockets,
Cut-away scrap nostrils,
And a wasteland of a mouth.

God’s Head is filled with aluminum and other precious metals
and throw-away objects.
God’s Head is jammed full of
Every beer and pop and ade and ale container
Ever made;
Every mixed vegetables and beets
And mushrooms and
String beans and early spring peas can
Ever produced;
Every tuna, sardine, oyster, and salmon
As well as a spam lovers’ paradise of
Every pull tab packaging or tin
Ever extruded
is in or coming out of his Head.

And now you know that
God is extrusion.
Now you know the
Nature of creation.

And when there are no raw materials left
From the relentless manufacture of everything,
God will have all of everything ever made
In his face.
In his room.

(And that will be the end of that.

Randy Mazie