The Surrealists of Soul

Oh, the smell of the Great American Garage Sale.
The scent of the Salvation Armies and Good Wills, antique stores,
Grandma’s basement and secondhand “boutiques”
The molecules of dust and time filling the air
Into my nostrils,
Telling my brain where I am.

It’s the odor of history and pride.
An war medal all rusty from where it hung for 37 years above the tool bench.
The guitar from the ages when Jimi was the king of those strings, whose owner only wanted to play like that god of rock.
Shelves of book s with their pages deteriorating from fingers,
Thousands of fingers that touched the binding and felt the words.
A tea cup brought from China before the fall of the empire.

Why did I come to look and sift through all this?
This stuff.
Junk.
I didn’t know Grandpa Steve or Uncle Robert of the rock and roll.
I didn’t write those books, but they are now part of my library
And I drink tea from China each afternoon.

This is the crap that keeps America going
The fuel from our houses and crawl spaces.
The blood and sweat that mixes with the dirt that settles on the ancient embroidered Christmas tree skirt that comes out once a year.
The pain that once got them through
Now pushes us

That’s why we collect and keep.
We gather
To tell ourselves that those piles around us have meaning.
To show that though we don’t have much
Much money
Much character or
Much future
Well, we’ve got much stuff.

We fill our attics and
Kitchens and backyard sheds
With things to define out
History and our space.

The colors and flecks of metal and skin
Accumulate behind doors and behind our
Faces
We’ve got some of those too.

The antique shops in the strip malls through the American mid-west
Sell pictures
So we can have faces for the stuff we’ve got
To know who it came from and to
Make up stories about how it came to us.

It’s entertainment for purpose
To find where we came from
But really, all we’ve done is hide
Behind the material
Behind the doors.

Unsure of how we got here
Clueless about where we’re going.