Not Meant To Be
we're there, in that dusty old attic,
lying among the rest of the world's
discarded ideas: title-only poems
and blank books that framed those
I've plucked from the store shelves,
the teleportation machine that takes
you only where you don't want to be
and a cloak of invisibility you can't
see out of, lying on the floor under
glass bottles, the kind you'd expect
to maybe hold homemade maple syrup,
but instead containing the aborted
imaginary friends of child soldiers
floating in suspension, dreaming-

and there, in shadows, behind a beam
of light issuing from a small square
window, unwanted gods creep and cringe:
ugly harvest goddesses and protectors
of villages where no one settled, an old
sun deity who doesn't see the point of
getting out of bed anymore, a war god
with a dog's head who'll fetch a stick
if you throw it. We'll make some small
sacrifice to them, asking to be together
if only in the minuscule dimensions
curling into themselves, forgotten.