BIG LOTS!

 Let's walk into Big Lots

Furniture pickup hours 10 to 5

Let's daydream of a life to have someday

Club music, fluorescent lights, linoleum squares

I want to dance outside a restaurant in a strip mall

On a sidewalk under the setting sun

Kitschy signs for a beach or a farm

When we couldn't be farther from either

Garden seeds of hope

That something will grow this year

Discounted discs

If you're just looking for something to watch

Garden pots and body boards, goggles and chair cushions

Say that maybe my childhood

The backyard pool of the couple long since divorced

Are not yet impossible to duplicate

And the plastic horses with hair you can comb

The Barbie dolls and plush animals

Say that maybe the childhood I got glimpses of

Could yet be someone else's

But let's move forward

Electric kettles, toasters, and coffee machines

The sort of thing my parents grasp at, to be

Stainless steel sophisticated, not complicated

That divorced couple

Had the best couch I've ever sat on

Though my homes, my college dorm

Were not without their plush-cushioned pleasures

And for years now I have come in here

I remember lugging and slipping and sweating

With my dad the wooden dressers

Fourth grade shopping for new beds

Flopping on the showroom mattresses

So I come here

And I dream that someday with someone like you

I might have reason and opportunity

To pick out a bed and a couch

The cupholder, or none, or two

Brown or gray or navy blue

The recliner and the sofa both?

We'll choose the quilt we'll share each night

For now, maybe a bottle of body soap

A room temperature coffee drink

A thin cardboard box of plastic-wrapped pastries

These are the things I live on now

As the couches I sit and kiss on change with the months and years

A year ago I would have got a tin of ham

Animal meat reshaped and preserves

A simple triangular block of pink

I am not trying to be a better person

I am trying not to eat the flesh of once-living beings

I hope it counts for something

Only because I need something to count for me

I will take and eat and make trash

And I will gather the trash up into bags

And I will gather myself up into bags

And I will save some of myself and I will send part of myself away where I do not have to think about that part of myself ever again

And maybe one day I will have gathered enough of myself up to be presentable

And I will buy you a ring and we will go to Big Lots

And look at the couches and you will pull me away from the DVDs and we will dream over the garden seed packets

Of growth and new things that are like the old things

And a world that will never end