Dambo.
I want to be a gangly recycle artist like Dambo,
the builder of wooden trolls.
Instead of discarded furniture, I use discarded poems,
snippets I’ve copied down in my commonplace books,
bits and pieces on suffering coz I know what’s that like now.
All the best poems have been written, Daz says.
He’s the one who wrote ‘The Parable of the Albino Pigeon’
so I listen.
“About suffering they were never wrong the Old Masters’,
says Auden, and I added:
while someone is bringing in the bins, watching ‘Bullet Train’
on Binge, or cleaning the car of dogs’ fur like my neighbour
who asks, Hey Bro, how’s it hanging? Do I even want to answer that?
‘This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears’
says Hopkins in ‘Felix Randall’
who taught me empathy;
and those lines from Mary Oliver;
‘Someone I once loved
gave me a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this too was a gift’.
You can’t better that, Daz would say.
So is cancer a gift?
Anyhow I want to build my wooden trolls of poems
coz like Daz says, the best poems have all been written.
pic courtesy of pinterest
John Malone 