There is no burden like unwanted things. Which is sad because, against all real evidence, things have feelings too. They don’t love in the human way, still:
That blue thrift shop sweater out at the elbows has a story. I try to imagine the places it has been, and who wore it before it was mine.
Those rundown cowboy boots slouched in the closet talk in accents from the Old West. I stare at them appreciating all the wrong roads they may have taken. Usually, I find a song in them.
Pale-portrait faces stored in the attic gaze sadly at each other, old, tattered books think softly to themselves in between readings, and under its yellow blanket, the whittled-down pencil dreams of writing again.
Not one of these things transcends its thingness; the artist who connects with them becomes all these things.
They become a part of my inheritance as a songwriter. Forsaken, they now take me in their arms.
