Signifying nothing

 When I was a kid the only clothes I  Recall my mother wearing were made of  Polyester (Polyester fabric is concocted From the tears of dinosaurs, oil rich And strong with fibrous fear learned hard in the swamps) "These pants would survive a nuclear war," She declared as she pulled them fast and Taught over her hips, pulling the elastic wide And letting go of the band with a pleasing Snap And nuclear war was a possible thing back then, You see.  While we may not have dived under  Desks at the first sound of a siren, we all knew That the possibility was there that we could wake Up dead, or worse, and that there would be no more Saturdays We watched it on the jittery rolling lines of TV Saw the flash saw the bones saw the flesh melt Away because of a disagreement about how the Economy was supposed to run and how poor people Were supposed to be poor in each, which rules  They were to obey and which leaders they should Adhere (Karl Marx, by the way, dreamed of ...

 When my grandfather visited     (a rare occasion since he lived      so far away across mountains      of crumbling red sandstone and      vast valleys of sea green sage) He would be up at dawn Every morning to rake the yard Of sticks and leaves and paper Blown in by the wind He grasped the rake firmly with His one good hand, using his Frozen arm to counterbalance Later, not long after he passed While looking at books on Japanese dry gardens,  I made The connection.  Who am I to  Know whether or not he had Made it too while the rake Scratched pattern and form, Order and purpose on the clay Back and forth. Back and forth Taking away that which doesn't Belong

I have no idea how many                                              Songs Are on this old iMac      (a fine machine that runs Fine) But in reverse               Alpha                              beti                                        cal Order They start with numbers Starting with 9999 (Ways to Hate Us)     by          the Clutters Your are soon rolling through the decades          2002  (a lost love letter to a lost)                            ...