Pinocchio's Elegy for the Unreal
       

Here's the rub: you're on your own.
What breaks isn't replaceable anymore.

Gepetto's hand on your unhinged knee
won't set it right again. A torn

finger can't be carved anew.
You prayed for this: Real Boy,

then, at last, a skin of your own
to hide within. Real boy arms

are limp arms against a sea
of troubles.Now the stuff

you're carved from rots,
touches all it can then forgets

the touch. Not to mention pain,
broken skin and bones, the heavy

human heart and the way you get the part
where Hamlet says: and by a sleep we end

the heart-ache and the thousand natural
shocks that flesh is heir to.

This is for you Gepetto,
deep in the sleep of death.

Listen up Old Man (who once pulled my strings
knit the motion to my dance, tied to me

somewhere inside even now,
only I can't see the cables, can only feel their tug

like loss's magnetic field between memory and gut)
I miss the certainty of my ligneous hands.

Everything's either too far away or not enough.
I can still hear the toys talk, still hear the whispers

of the inanimate world, the soul of objects.
I wish you'd told me about the way it feels

to be watching life from a dying body.
Your workshop's veiled with cobwebs

every old tool dreams of your hands
your smoothing grip. In the corner

a spider unlaces a luna moth. A dinner
too huge too gossamer to be real.

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Copyright © 2015 Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis All rights reserved
from The Rub
Elixir Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission