String

Make your mania your music

Do you feel the chaotic concerto?

The cloaked and clandestine composer

Plucking at the ivory keys, exactly eighty eight

With even more ways to tangle those

Countless red strings of taut linear fate.

To be a being, we first must begin

To begin, we must be born, then torn

From the lively, slick, loud, and slimy link

Of mother’s umbilical cord, now

Cut.

Cartwheel your baby body from the delivery room

To sitting criss cross applesauce atop a cedar stool

It’s snack time at age four,

Celery sticks, peanut butter, milk in a plastic cup

Chug whatever lies before your youthful eyes-

Slam the glass down, now look at you, twenty two

Disillusioned with the notes you hear, but cannot play

Plucking the strings, now we all sing to the song

Of a puppet on a string dancing, dancing

To the melody that is tied to us as we trudge along.

“And now here we are at eighty eight,

Did you think you would make it to the retirement home?

The fuzzy television screens, the dementia, the barely palatable

Food that nearly slides itself off your plate, look at you

Still slimy, still newly born.

Let me cut your cord

You made it, this is your reward.

Is this all that you have hoped for?

Well it better be, for this is the sound

Of your string’s final, echoing chord”

Snap.

Break your celery stick betwixt

The anger you feel, your fear,

And the peanut buttery memories

That stick to the roof of your mouth,

The ones you hold so dear.