untitled 18

when I was young
the­days seemed
short as I was

I would take old radios
apart
how did they­work?
I stank of dust,
ofburnt wires.

some­one gave
me a bro­ken­cam­era.
I scraped off green
cor­ro­sion,
it worked again.
they took it back ?
I was that young

now,
I am old.
twen­ty-two ? obso­lete

I?ve tak­en too many
things apart
to put­to­geth­er.
I smell of burnt wires.
of dust.

3 thoughts on “untitled 18”

  1. i like the nar­ra­tive style. the words that are put togeth­er is an inter­est­ing device, if maybe a bit of a “one-lin­er.” it’s like all that elec­tric­i­ty and mechan­i­cal stuff messed up your insides so now you’ve become the machine. i’m a fan of the plain lan­guage.

  2. it’s an inter­est­ing idea to explore, this obses­sion with tak­ing things apart and then putting them togeth­er. what a weird idea; right now there are thou­sands of peo­ple doing this. maybe there is some­thing more to write about in this area — like, things get tak­en apart and put togeth­er and they may or may not work but large­ly this all goes by unno­ticed. but as you allude to in your poem, it can make a world of a dif­fer­ence to the per­son fool­ing around with the stuff.

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