Bradbury’s Closet
In the nursery, nothing is too good for our children.
Stop yelling at walls when they grasp at our book of old tales.
Trying to sleep, you are compacted, sticking out gently.
There’s a little blood in your blanket and I enter it,
instinctively torturing it like a door slam.
I laugh. You cry. Nobody reacts.
I check the little ones, but the nursery is
a huge, huge door.
We stare at the door as if something
is jumping against it from the other side.
So, let’s tear down the Nursery.
The children are lions and
there are lines of lions, lines of
fathers too.
Unlike them, you were never too young.
You had one out before you knew
what your widget twas, what you on
someone else’s soul was, what shooting people
with capital letters on stringent lines was.
No wonder they stepped into a pickup,
a door straight away form your make-believe
suitcase of debris.
Growing old children is hard.
You exercise your mind with domestic fantasies,
while they open and enter any installed door
to escape from you who are
down the dark hallways,
eager to restrict the way one
kisses the lions.
This poem originally appeared in The Grave of the Great Alley of Clarity Cats, an anthology of poetry written by Mike Giardina. The complete the anthology is available below:
Table of contents:
- Sun Shine Body
- On arrival in a lot of no civilization and plenty of letters,
- The unable to deliver
- An upwards slanted walk
- A familiar voice
- Those who have a standard way of going
- Left each chapter within us
- Warm smile not found in her cigarette
- To regain his composure for figures
- Food for rejecting his feet
- Even during--even if it during
- Lying on the floor, stretched after stir
- A soldier frames the wall
- A step by boulder
- A train by life station
- I was able to take the old north of town
- Fledgling
- Job
- Bradbury's closet
- A mummy's leggings
- Sipping mother's sweat
- Flash like an individual there
- I realize the skyline while playing catch with mother's death
- Running far away from a city, to return a week later
- Dysmorphexia
- Carried the clock over
- We have been meeting years
- Chocolate Italian princess
- Champion of Years
- "How much longer will I be able to remount the mothproof thrusting..."
- Over as rivers are over