There's an oppressive amount of stuff in my garage.
It is opulently overstuffed — grotesque even —
in its betrayal of my minimalist fantasy. It needs
to be cleaned out before I die and my family is left
to sift the layers like amateur archeologists.
Faced with this calamity of material desire,
I rubbed my head and a genie popped out. He said, "Speak
like a flower with the color of your desires." Turns out
it was just my mannequin memory with its sartorial smile,
reminding me my heart's a grenade and I can't prove it,
or get rid of this pineapple of ammunition in my chest.

If I could gather up the strands of my unwoven days,
maybe I'd braid my way to a better, less frizzy world.
And less would be better: less stuff in the garage, fewer desires
and magical creatures in my head, less hair in my sink.
In search of the pent-up motion of stillness I paid attention
to how things move. And honestly, my life is already a stalled car.
I need some form of movement to intervene in all the nonactivity
going on around here.

I'm distracted - enamored really - with the notion there's magic
in my bald head. But the mind is a slippery character.
Memories are eulogies of past mistakes, loose ends.
My ego is a drunken child. Absent the light of logic,
my brain is a black hole. I could use a small miracle —
nothing flashy like a parting sea, just moving this junk elsewhere.
What is a head full of magic full of anyway? 

Well, like the boy I was raised to be, I will lay aside
my existential doubts and tuck into weaving all the loose strands
in my garage. The miracle is I'm still here, kicking this stuff around,
with maybe a chance to do the right thing once before I close
this garage for the last time. As for the magic — well, we're all magicians
at some level, though lacking the necessary Houdini-ness for levitation.
So I'll roll the hose, box the carburetor parts, sweep out the dead leaves,
squirrels, find suitable homes for the flotsam of my life,
work on defining the colors of my desires, all while defusing
the ammunition in my heart.