Through The Cracked Looking Glass...

Department Store Mannequin Returns From the Front

I jumped from behind the display glass
With my automatic rifle and my righteous words
Yet behind the vortex,act crass, smoke lawns grass
Presently, I'm rolling in foreign dirts turds
Ravished at the images of your sacramental curds

What if electrical currents ignited deadened fingers
Would the moment justify burning law to the ground?
Somehow, I can't let more fascists infidels linger
Without a bodies young comforts, you're lost not found
Open these security gates danger, release the fiery hounds

I say burn all the pornography with bomb blasts
Save me the audio, I like to study the perverse sounds
I am at the ship's wheels directing my animal spawn
How to live in harmony with the savage man
Who must improve others, no plan, not so fast, will it ever last?

They sent my mannequin to the desert unequipped
He wrote me letters about he'd been so gippped
His helmet was made of plastic, his shield of play-doh
He said he was issued the same gun as cartoon G.I. Joes
I wailed when he said he'd lost his big toe

I wrote lucky you're a mannequin, you don't feel a thing
The next morning, in my ears, there was a constant ring
I smashed all the alarms with my bare fist, my girlfriend said
I told her, last night I dreamed her head exploded,
and while I tried in vain to stop it, my cracking bones imploded

When my mannequin returned from the front
He was alive barely likea fake plastic man flesh beaten yo-yo
Shocked! He could feel his fingers, even his phantom toes
What was it they said, he had felt like a sitting duck on frozen pond
Except for flashes of schrapnel that made breathing like a stunt

He remembered being a child mannequin window runt
People exploded bombs ignited by oh so pious tongues
And his troop labelled all of them inhumane evil ones
Stepping over the quite dead and their living ghosts, loves
on invisible rungs
You'd be captivated by the hoax, sheltered from the blunt

Why was he trapped in this fragile mass?
It was better in a mannequins silent morass
Then to burn in the nightmares of your high school class
He was so smart, so brave, he was the leader in the musical cast

Maybe, it was time to go inside glass and beyond
Become a new tadpole morphing into his new pond
Until flesh no longer bleeds he's a man missing appendages
Now, I'll take off these invisible man bandages
Until they pack my parts away in boxes, like careful sausages

Micah Zevin 2007

All department store mannequins write me a letter about your life battles?
When will you return from your war front?