Photo by Mason B.
The Post Office @ Christmas
Josh Humphrey
The meaning of threadbare is this sweater that catches
every corner, snags every splinter so easily and makes me
think of my daughter. The meaning of threadbare is
a day you hold up and see all the others through–I am
a boy who collects stamps, a man caught dead in thoughts.
The customers say time goes too fast, time goes too slow.
But it is a drop of water and a cup of sand both,
immeasurable as a blessing or a curse. It is Christmas again
in the post office. They still haven’t fixed the door that
closes too fast. Every time someone leaves, the room is
slammed empty. I am behind the counter lost in postmarks–
the places I’ve been and the ones I will never, so surrounded
by memories and dreams like a man, like a man who never
makes the phone call, like a man who knows the press
of that thirty-year stapler so well in his hands that he has
forgotten the weight and measure of his lost people, nothing
but a whisper of a smell that drifts back slow and accidental
though I will walk all the town to bottom in searching.
Josh Humphrey
The meaning of threadbare is this sweater that catches
every corner, snags every splinter so easily and makes me
think of my daughter. The meaning of threadbare is
a day you hold up and see all the others through–I am
a boy who collects stamps, a man caught dead in thoughts.
The customers say time goes too fast, time goes too slow.
But it is a drop of water and a cup of sand both,
immeasurable as a blessing or a curse. It is Christmas again
in the post office. They still haven’t fixed the door that
closes too fast. Every time someone leaves, the room is
slammed empty. I am behind the counter lost in postmarks–
the places I’ve been and the ones I will never, so surrounded
by memories and dreams like a man, like a man who never
makes the phone call, like a man who knows the press
of that thirty-year stapler so well in his hands that he has
forgotten the weight and measure of his lost people, nothing
but a whisper of a smell that drifts back slow and accidental
though I will walk all the town to bottom in searching.