MiPOesias Magazine

SIMON DEDEO

Simon DeDeo is a scientist and writer in Chicago.

This feeling is calling my name

I am putting grappling hooks into the surface of the real and drawing myself up from the Unitarian-Universalist church room where the teen from New Jersey places one ballet shoe down.

The British photographer pays undergraduates to go shopping with him and later takes them to the hotel where he pulls on the lingerie from Victoria’s Secret. He reaches out with one hand to the horizon, his lisp is like a fine bone china.

In Trenton the Philadelphia train barrels past “Trenton Makes The World Takes” and the dying son takes a cellphone portrait in the bathroom. There is no woman to stroke his feathered hair, nor is there a granite as split and polished as his retina.

There are three valid attempts at a password and the fourth is invalid. The machinist's mate puts his arm against the bar. Outside the horses from Central Park return to the stables with each Muslim carriageman listlessly tickling his steed’s back with a whip.

The Archangel Gabriel blesses the Virgin Mary in a reprinting of the Leonardo painting. Nothing can lift me above the pinnacle of the real. I watch my self pull the lever of the mechanical arm.

The arm carries me to the land of Oz, the hospital ward, the interior of a Westbound bus full of the wounded seeking shelter.

Cleaning the wooden floor of my third floor apartment I imitate the rag and bone man from my youth. I sing sweeping dirt and wreckage into the dustpan.

Could there be anything but this joyful noise that fills the rooms of our belonging?

Could the teen, the photographer, the dying youth, the Muslim, the archangel, the battle-wounded, could myself, be anything other than they are?