Survive: Collected Poems

On What We Notice

Last night while cleaning my room
In preparation for a friend visiting this weekend,
I found a pencil sharpener shoved under my desk.
I picked it up and heard the tiny screws rattling around inside
Like two old, hardened seeds in a shriveled up pod.
I'd seen it as just a normal object until the screws.

And then I remembered that in this past May or June I'd had a bad episode and stolen it from my room at my grandma's.
A quick "I'm going up to my room for something" and a secretive shove into my jeans pocket.
When I got home that day, I shut the door to my room at home and climbed on my bed.
With the point of a pen, I unwound the minuscule screws and dropped the blades - only the size of my thumbnail - into my Pandora's Box of dangerous objects.
I locked the box away in the back of my jewelry cabinet in case I ever needed it.
Then I shoved the hollowed out seed pod underneath my desk, so that no one happened across it and asked me where I'd stowed its fertile fruits.

Last night, in the middle of October, I held the object in my lap and considered the weight of a seemingly innocent plastic and metal container.
Many, upon finding this in an assortment of other junk would shrug and think, "oh, this pencil sharpener's broken," and toss it aside.
It would land with a tinny rattle of the screws inside, but the sound would not be significant.
But to a wiser, more considerate population, two centimeter long screws in an otherwise empty receptacle for pencil shavings could not be more telling.
It takes a soul who has seen darkness to see through the surface and perceive the gesture behind it.
The object is not broken.
It is exactly how I wanted it to be.
The gesture was precise.
Methodical.
Calculated.
And in the four months since,
No one in my household has known a thing.
I have not consumed the forbidden pomegranates of my Pandora's Box, of course, but I have lifted the lid and stared at their ripeness, my lips wet with longing.

It is fascinating to me that some only see a broken utensil.
While others see a premeditated design, an object rife with possibility and ruin.
Is it innocence?
Is it ignorance?
Is it oblivion?
I don't know, but I don't envy them.