Poetry, Even If Nobody Ever Notices

Nailed
in the style of Kenneth Koch, revised

I would like to take this moment to stop and thank the six-penny nail
and the broken birdhouse that I fixed last Saturday, because I’ve always wanted
to smash my thumb with a hammer. Really, who wouldn’t want this purple finger
crushed by the labor of putting the roof back over the heads of several little birds?
I certainly must thank that nail for being so small
that I might miss it and hit my hand instead.

A nail really isn’t much of anything stocked in the hardware store,
aisle three, in a grimy cardboard box surrounded by other dusty little boxes
full of bolts and nuts and screws of various sizes.
The aisle is long and straight and disappears in the distance,
and so does a nail if you are a curious little flea seated at the head,
enjoying a blend of sweet lumber and glue and fertilizer wafting in
from aisles four through ten. The nail is too metallic to smell any different
than it tastes, like sharp cheddar cheese sliced ready to eat.
A paper towel keeps the flies and dust away from the food at the Fourth of July party
while the cousins chase each other through the dirt with water guns and noise makers.
Little Michael will inevitably get water squirted in his eye. It will sting and he will cry,
but only for a few minutes once he discovers the brownies just set out in the kitchen.

Licking frosting off of fingertips is a most satisfying rebellion,
one which is intensified if the frosting is stolen from the corner of an uncut cake laden with entire gardens of buttercream flowers.
Unfortunately for sneaky finger-lickers, the sort of nails made of keratin protein that grow on their tips make tiny receptacles storing fluff and dirt.
Small children are especially guilty of collecting black gunk
while spending hot summer days building castles and pies out of mud.
They squelch and mush and mold entire cities that dry in the sun and crumble by evening,
and then their mothers yell at them to wash up for dinner.
“Thomas Emil, did you use soap?! I don’t smell any!”
and little Tommy scampers away to try again.

Washing is especially important in the fall. School starts
and boys like Tommy must be relatively presentable,
or at least as presentable as Mrs. Smith’s son, who is always clean and well-prepared with Lunchables and every-color gel pens.
Good students must learn how to add and sit with proper posture and they should never be dusty,
even though they are very much the same as gadgets in a hardware store,
and accomplished politicians, when they can be found, are just like skyscrapers built by a thousand hammers.
Even Abe Lincoln once sat in school picking his nose with dirty fingernails.
Meanwhile, the wallflowers are like finishing nails, small and discrete—
you’re not supposed to see them at all. They are like winter
when for several months the earth dresses in chastity—
brush your hand around your doorframe and you’ll feel nothing
but maybe a little grit if you haven’t dusted.
People can be nailed, too, but that’s of a far different sort, kind of like a person being hammered
is not at all the same as the door frame built with finishing nails.

Someday, when spring comes, all the little boys and girls will hatch out of school.
The foreman will say “Spike it!” and they might be carpenters built like skyscrapers with steel bone and cement muscle.
Or they might save the world, or invent ice cream that doesn’t melt and dry like mud pies.
They can be professors or actors
or poets if they’re lucky.

And they can fall in love.
People are like nails keeping families stuck together,
keeping sanity relatively flush with reality.
I hope, then, that my love—your love—
is like one of those nails so strong it’s frightening,
the kind that is always without fail
well-stocked on the bottom shelf at the hardware store—
brush it off and reveal cold silver, glistening galvanized steel,
sold individually, 10,000-pennies at least!
Nobody knows what it’s for exactly,
but they sell it, so it must be good for something.
And love is something, like doorframes and birds
and children are some things
worth smashing your thumbs for,
even if nobody ever notices.