Hello and goodbye.
I really have no envy
for Nebuchadnezzar's feet of clay,
or Chinese girls' bound tender tootsies in ancient times,
or the bloody and lacerated soles of Pheidippides of Marathon
because I still do have my primate's toes,
but those before, at least, were fortunate
in retaining a wholeness to their
pedes
while my plinth has been shattered.
No, no envy.
I just miss the light, is all.
I don't expect to see it all the time
in the dark boxy drawer where I dwell,
where I can at least hear plenty of muffled television noise,
nor do I ever really expect to.
I don't even need a sudden flood of it
real or depicted even in an allegorical painting
akin to perhaps Bosch, Blake or David,
something like a
'Phoebus' Triumphant Descent Into the Turgid Stygian Maelstrom of the Foetid River Styx' type of thing.
Gods, no.
But those of you who are as I am,
you who are legion,
who just barely remember the place of your nascence,
do you remember greedy fingers
snatching you away
and clutching at and massaging
every square inch of your frame,
and gleeful eyes examining
every bit of your nakedness
until you were crammed (hopefully in one piece) into a backpack or purse
where the denseness and proximity to other untold items
made you absolutely wretched and nauseous
and you counted the minutes until release
would at length be nigh?
And do you who remember
gaining that blessed freedom
remember where you ended up afterwards?
Irreverently placed
atop a shelf or desk in a girl's bedroom
amongst the likes of Wonder Woman or Barbie
or in a boy's room with Boba Fett or Iron Man?
Yet none of them would talk to you
because you 'technically' were more sculpture than toy (snobbery!
they were not at all friendly like in those fatuous 'Toy Story' films!)
Sculptures as glorious as Galatea or Zeus of Olympia, I say!
But more often than not, in the fullness of time,
you were bored of and discarded,
perhaps tossed into a translucent plastic box
where light barely shone through,
or even in one of cardboard where it may not have at all,
but I hope in your time
you may have spared a thought
for those perhaps lost
and smashed to atoms
who jettisoned this cruel orb
all stoic and unsquealing...
I hope.
But all I can tell you is,
courage, my friends!
And I'll also wager you were never named.
"He never gave me a name."
But now, perhaps after remorse,
he has at last vouchsafed me
to see the Sun.
Ita perseveret.
And so
(back) to bed.
Goodbye and hello.
DB/4.2019
