Junk Yard Butterfly Revival

Junk Yard Butterfly Revival

2-Sept-2011

I can laugh with you.

With you I’d laugh my belly off in junk yards.

Kissing rusted car parts, stitching up torn and forgotten ragdolls,

Tying together every single foil gum wrappers we can find into a statue of the Eiffel tower.

We would laugh like children; we would find beauty in the subtleties.

*

How funny it is that that rusted blue bicycle and the limping red wagon found each other in this sea of discarded life, this ocean of forgotten junk.

They lay there side by side, immovable as mountains.

As the years go by they seem to bend into a closer embrace.

Beneath this growing heap of once cherished stories they sway into the soil.

Submitting to their burden, they lay their lives in this path, holding down the earth that threatens to swallow them, and holding up this collection of unlikely junk,

This heap of wayward loved ones, these lonely toaster, voiceless radios and sole less rubber boots.

*

And yes, we’d be laughing, because what sweet subtleties they are.

They are not lifeless; their wheels spin in infinity,

That bicycle rings its crocus bell until her rosy wagon cheeks are tulips.

They whistle lullabies into busted radio speakers and use toasters to make gum wrapper waffles which they slide into the heels of all the rubber boots.

*

And look at these butterflies, these fleeting angels.

They heed not their frailties.

Their eyes see only flowers in this desert landfill.

They know nothing of rusty joints and flat tires,

of burnt fuses, muddy puddles, short circuits and busted speakers drums.

But they speak fluent flowers and their wings tips swish to the ebb and flow of sea tides.

They are tender gardeners, generous.

Fully giving of their fragile frames, they carry mounds of pollen on their head tops,

And weave spider webs around watering cans,

Lifting them in unity, they quench the thirst of this flowering junk yard.

Giving life to beautiful subtleties, to love stories between wagons and bicycles, who carry mountains of adopted grandchildren on their backs.

*

We are cradled by them, these rapturous butterflies.

I am weightless in their tiny insect angle arms.

See me now; I am wholly rusted before you, laughing my belly off.

I am suspended between them in a spider web stretcher attached to my creaking shattered spine handle.

I am craning; being tilted into this, pouring forth what is not mine but is flowing through me.

Emptied of poisoning self and filled from the Invisible Source,

This is a vessel of sweet waters, a holy watering can, a clear channel, laughing its belly off.