Poetry: Junk Love and Other Poems

Junk Love 

He stands alone, unbalanced on either-or.

Does he go forward loaded down, looking back,

Or face the future empty with unknowns in front of him?

In the basement his rocking chair sits still,

Unmoved by decades of old thoughts.

There was no space for it next to his bed.

In the attic his stamp collection remains

Unsorted and rare, whole empires lost in it,

Unhinged inside plastics yellowed by age.

In the garage a walnut lumber stack

Awaits a hardy hand to plane it smooth

Into a new table for a feast in the dining room.

It all rises in value as his voice gathers dust.

Will his children see what he did with a life,

All of it too much for the words still unsaid?

Should he lift each relic to the overhead bulb,

Look it in the eye, say farewell, 

We’re in a mess, time for you to go

To the thrift shop for the lazy day

He comes wandering through again

Looking for great deals and lost loves.

Ecologics

In the city park the old man with two teeth

Sits on a bench next to tiger-lilies near a pond.

He smiles at the Syrian refugee mother walking by.

The Syrian mother has no name for tiger-lilies.

The old man’s job-seeking son lives far away

Dreaming of girls, happiness and his money’s worth.

The ditches along county roads are littered with trash.

The Syrian mother is looking for her lost son.

The two-toothed old man remembers his long-gone wife.

The city wants a bigger share of county revenues.

The old man’s son never looked for Syria on a map,

Or for the Syrian mother’s son walking away in hot sun.

The two-toothed old man wonders how many tiger-lilies

Ever smiled or dared to make love to his beloved boy.

He does not look for the Syrian mother’s missing-in-action son.

No one asks who mothered the two-toothed old man,

Or who fathered the missing-in-action Syrian son,

Or why tiger-lilies bloom in a highway ditch

When the grass in the park needs rain.

Nobody mentions taxes, the pond or the wars,

Or sees the refugee mother’s son dim in desert dust.

On a highway the old man’s son sees the teeth

Of empty beer cans gleaming in a county ditch.

His mother always smiled big when he walked in.

The two-toothed old man sits and stares.

The refugee mother shrinks, walking away.

The grass in the park needs rain.

Flow Chart

The blind trace plot lines no one sees–

The direction, velocity, and mass

Of the earth’s holiest ghosts

Weaving past the windows of schools

Into the rows of marching bands

And into bugs intoxicated by buds.

On Wall Street where the spirits of lost souls

Speak in tongues about futures on the rise,

The ghosts drift above traffic jams

To console zero-stares on factory floors 

Where rivets are carefully honed 

To bond mortgages to wars.

On summer nights the ghosts wander wildly

With seeds, owls and trees,

Passing from air to leaf to root, into dirt

Laced with chemicals and prayers

Infected by the malware of pesticides.

There they nose for the logic of loam.

         © Emilio DeGrazia 2025