Warts & All

image borrowed from southernmetals.com 

Warts and All

“There is a road from the eye to the heart

that does not go through the intellect.”

--Gilbert Keith Chesterton.

Behold the beauty

of things dead & discarded;

find your reflection.

Harmony or discord, gleaming gems or gruesome garbage, three coats

of hand-rubbed wax over four coats of metallic paint on a fender or the

rust pocks & pits on it decades later sitting in a forgotten corner of a

farmer’s field, a weather vane of an iron rooster bent in half from a bolt

of lightning, a pious pile of salvaged vehicle brakes, toothless gears,

and bent hub caps, a dead John Deere with flat tires covered mostly

with blackberry vines, a building after a fire, a castle keep or rampart

centuries after deterioration, shattered swords amidst antique weaponry,

acres of old planes, military & conventional, with wires & straps waving

in the breeze, row after row of mothballed ships of past wars, huge 

wrecking yards where cars are stacked up like grotesque waffles, ivy-

choked moss-encrusted wrought iron gates hanging askance on broken

hinges, headless statues with missing wings & appendages, abandoned

houses, factories, & insane asylums still standing--filled with equal parts

pain & joy, discarded dreams, fat spiders & useless bedsprings, 100-year

old newspapers found as insulation in pioneer cabins, the sheen on

elk ribcages picked clean by predators, insects, & weather, log jams of

smashed trees clogging fast-flowing streams, lichen & fungal mushrooms

sprouting from trunks & branches, seedlings growing out of the rotted

hearts of dead-black stumps, perfect geometry created accidentally  

on sidewalks & curbs, in train yards, & across rooftops, busted padlocks,

rings of unclaimed keys, patina that has eaten through solid steel doors,

a flag preserved & displayed despite its tattered edges & cannonball

holes, ship wrecks left on remote beaches, greasy wooden bins of

old car doors & hoods, the smiling chrome teeth in old grills & bumpers,

or powerful pallets of detached engine blocks, gutted transmissions, or

huge burlap sacks of metal washers.

Beauty can reside

in hellish haze, refuse or

patina’s embrace.

Glenn Buttkus

Posted over on dVerse Poets Poetics

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