Glass Elephants Poem by L'Angley S Delmonte

Hold me hanging above the swing set
Shiny green and newfangled
My body is too big for me now
Let me run across to the far tree
with my bicycle sprawled
like so many dead things
across its roots
I will join the assembly of being
and, shrouded in sleet and espionage,
I will watch all the tiny red people
As they play their strange games

Huddled under the metal crossbars
with their haphazard mosaic of chewing gum
pick at the white strings
of your cut off jeans
I'll look at you like a naked light bulb
Tell you you're beautiful, like a reptile
When the cords get too frayed
and the sheets get too thin
and we pack up and go back to the parking lot.

Laugh, palms and fingers on the warm tile,
feeling like insects for something
every valley in the mortar shooting to your brain
and the water smells like matches
Wring out your once black t-shirt
Like a pigeon's neck
and tell me you love me
Burn your lips on my cigarette
Tell me about the kids at the movie theatre last Tuesday
and slip through the door.
I'll wait, like a lion