Tag: Nostalgia

Baseball Cards

Published on by @DwPolkLeave a comment

i’ve begun to hold you again
colorful cardboard portal
young men gripping bats
like no one ever ages

i used to take you for granted
trade you, shove you into
shoe boxes, stacking Tigers
and Orioles, reading statistic
after statistic, the only math
that ever made sense

now with gray hair, you are
mine again, behind plastic
i cradle delicate memory
this time around i know
nothing lasts forever

Typewriter’s Last Words

Published on by @DwPolkLeave a comment

Please don’t leave me now
that you’ve seen the future.

My ink is real and you can touch
my paper with your hand holding

words, the ones pressed by my metal.
Permanent black rune, my tattooed

sentences offer so much more than
the screen, where mistakes disappear.

Delete, delete, delete-so easy to
forget all the missteps and time taken

to roll sheet after sheet. But each
letter, each tap, was your imprinted

mind. Go to the computer, but this
crumpled beauty, you will never find.

Pontiac

Published on by @DwPolkLeave a comment

my daughter already talks about the
car she wants an Audi, new, shiny
that her friends will admire like
her iPhone with apps that take
wrinkles out of faces in photos

I tell her about my maroon
dented station wagon, Pontiac
1986 Michigan-made to barely
last past puberty

I parked it with pride
my piece of remembering
that life is unreliable
always ready to
start then stop

blind to history my daughter
will never know the struggle of
driving a car that quit, gave up

for her they don’t exist
like rotary phones
like an indigenous name
turned into painted steel