Cardigans

I don't have one,

A cardigan that smells vaguely like a grandfather.

I don't have one of those either,

A grandfather.

And people who do not have and cannot have...they steal.

.

So I have stolen ten thousand slivers of various souls

In the pathetic hope of piecing together one tangible heart

To soothe my thoughts when the world is dark because I

Have no cigar smoke memories to cling to,

No stories told in a rough voice to daydream about.

.

I have only the dark,

The stark reality that people die and leave others to dream

About what sort of flowers and faces decorated their funerals.

There is no comfort in this space of monsters in the closet.

I wonder what it would be like to have something.

.

These slivers aren't enough.

They don't even form half of a cloudy memory.

I've broken in my own cardigans but it doesn't work.

I've hovered on the periphery of old conversations but the smoke

Of those beautiful pipes doesn't seem to stick.

.

I have plenty of old things that passed through

The aged hands of a boy turned man turned grandfather.

I have pens that smell like 1940's cigarettes,

Cars that belong to people who once had white hair.

Typewriters that the men before me could maintain.

.

They are all a farce, after all, because I caught them in a net.

I cast out feelings into the wide open ocean and waited

For the little toy boats of grandfathers whose arthritic hands

Let them slip out of reach and fall onto the current.

And then I stole them.

.

To play pretend.

I lifted the free prizes out of the ghostly grip of the dead

Just to play a round of house with myself where I could dream

That someone had stuck around to love me enough

To give me a little gift of themselves.

.

Instead, I'm snatching cardigans off the Goodwill shelves

Like a sick vampire hoping to find a cure in the blood I drink.

I'm stealing hundreds of stories, pennies on the ground,

And little Christmas decorations gone to rot.

They are unused and unloved and forgotten.

.

They were trash to the grandchildren.

In my hands, they are worshipped with tears.

They are worshipped with the raw devotion of someone who wants

And can never have, who has to steal the crumbs of the dead

To feel a little something like home.