The Unpublished Poet’s Inventory

Is it a hardware store
Like the one your father
Had you run errands past

To pick up odd items
With specific functions,
Usually small things

Like peculiar hinges
Or tool accessories?
A hardware store stocks shelves

Of such inscrutables,
Each with its own purpose,
Identical copies

Of rarely used bradawls. . . .
Or is it more a store
For trinkets and tchotchkes,

Whimsical, functionless,
Handmade without purpose
But to please and so sell?

Most poets would recoil
At either suggestion,
And probably rightly,

But imagine a shop
On top of a midden,
Where someone with odd tools

Deconstructs the broken
Chairs and decorations
That once belonged to homes,

Generating neither
Narrowly useful nor
Shallowly provoking

Small monsters suggestive
Of lives they don’t quite have.
What’s the point? There’s no point.