My Desk

My desk has spaghetti on it

It does, really

And leaves

and bricks

and two cannon which point at my face

when the spaghetti doesn’t twist them some other way

The spaghetti is sauceless

no butter or cheese either

it connects my laptop to the world

To the scanner, two printers, a hard drive, my cell phone, my iPod

Power

It lies there in a mass, woven together like marsh grass in a Gullah basket I saw in the museum on Hilton Head once

But not as pretty or expensive

The leaves are stacked nicely for leaves anyway

In piles near the edges of the desk

Poised like the ships teetering on the edge of the flat world

They tell me things

Who I need to pay, who I can put off until next month

that my daughter should consider Pratt even though she wants to be a journalist

They’ll be reshuffled and eventually filed or thrown away

Not like tree leaves

The ones that get raked up into piles

To be jumped in

The pointy pin oakey ones like the ones on a Gullah basket woven from marsh grass I saw once in a museum on Hilton Head

The bricks are smaller than real brinks

The kind towns slap all over their storefronts in the Northeast to make them look Colonial

Like Williamsburg

Virginia

Still, my bricks are smarter, not stronger mind you, just smarter
They are a cell phone, a hard drive and an iPod

They hold things more important to me than the colonial bricks could

People, places, things all stored in little tiny bits

Like rice in that Gullah basket woven from marsh grass that I saw in the museum on Hilton Head once

And don’t worry

The two cannon which sit, pointed at my head, don’t fire bullets

They're speakers which fire things far more important

Than bullets

They fire a barrage of words and music and ideas from people smarter than me

From people in places I’ve never been

Places I may never go

Places where they weave baskets out of marsh grass like the one I saw in that museum on Hilton Head once.