carpenter's song

carpenter's song

“You know it don’t take much intelligence to get yourself into a nailed-up coffin, Laura.

But who in hell ever got himself out of one without removing one nail?”

—Tom, The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams

"[F]or the overpowering sloth of sadness is upon him.

The sloth that ends in going to bed and staying there until you develop some disease."

—A Single Man, Christopher Isherwood

he never imagined himself a carpenter

until he came to realize these things

he built his coffin-life trapped in a world

where he did not matter to anyone

and matter was the word of his undoing

he had nailed himself inside quite deftly

knowing he didn't exist by the fact of his existence

(and now he found irony a cruel routine by the universe)

but his was not a song of sadness and paralysis

although that is what everyone could see and feel

this was a song of knowing against the darkness and weight

of waking with her on a morning best suited for kissing her neck

and sliding his hand over the dampness of lying against each other all night

of a warm summer evening when light hangs on beautifully

and she slips her feet into his lap while they are reading

of walking down the street under a moon full and orange

with her talking and taking his hand in hers because it matters

of whispering i love you's and i missed you's with one under the other

fully together because soft words and skin are honest and healing

so he sang his love for her silently to himself

humming patiently to lift the nails from the lid

imagining his hand around her ankle to anchor

the swelling of his heart that promised he would rise