Elementary

Elementary
Whatever possessed me to walk
To you again on that
Overbearingly sunny day
I do not know

You are not
Remotely far away
And I passed you
So many times --
On my way to the store,
Walking in the rain,
Or to catch the bus
To meet new friends --
Not even seeing you, really

You became
An oblique house of memory
That sheltered a shard of self
I broke off me with gut-splitting force
And buried,
Somewhere,
Like an obscure footnote
I hoped no one would ever find--
Not even a nice old couple,
Quite by accident,
Who'd likely feel only
An indulgent kind of pity

Not for other eyes
Are these marks

But I guess on that day
I was lonely enough
To hoard myself back together,
Now that the new friends
Have become old
And gone

I set a nervous foot on your soil
Trying not to flinch
When I passed the place
Where the white-haired wild monster
Of a librarian roared at me for hiding
Among the books at lunch hour
And I sobbed,
Great rolling salty tears,
For all the hate in that small world

You are pretty much gutted, now,
Like the war-zone you were

Where your out-buildings stood lie patches
Of mute gravel
Your playground is mostly just stumps
In dark old sand
And the batting cage
In the yawning field out back
Leans tiredly,
One foot off the ground,
Like a weary old nag

You are a strange sight
Among all these bright white houses
And overly-kept stamps of lawn

Like me you are
A brown and fumbling smudge
On this gleaming suburbia,
Always half in a state
Of abandonment