i left the typewriter
you got my out on the back porch;
with cord dangling between railings &
half-open eyelids.
i shut them this morning as one
does for the departed.
i don't really know what led
to the impulse to leave it out
there but the typewriter had been
sitting in my closet so long
that i thought it was time to 
let it out. i'm imagining 
that maybe in the dark 
(alongside my winter hats 
& stacks of ramen noodles)
that maybe the typewriter imagined
letters it wanted to compose.
inventing a mother & father to 
write home to 
maybe the typewriter
formulated a back story where he 
was from a small town, like me, 
where the corn sighs all summer &
the foxes stamp the tilled soil with 
their tracks. 
the satisfying thuck as the tab button
swings words into a new stanza.
next, the typewriter would 
sign to an ex-wife, 
asking for her back, telling her that
they would be better this time &
it would buy her those hyacinth bushes
she wanted for the front yard.
i have to admit that when this
typewriter turned
on it sounded more like mechanical reaper 
than a device of poetry,
fluttering to life
like an aluminum foil butterfly. 
i hunched on the floor of my dorm room 
as it whirled. the typewriter
electric-blinked, dazed in the white glow
of my overhead light. old-ink faint
from use, it had a pacifist's voice,
gentle as i showed the typewriter how 
i wrote love poetry, there was
something corporeal about the keys, 
the feeling of knuckles becoming space bards
& indents. 
the rain came quiet this morning
over its body. this is a elegy 
to the words it spoke for us & it's own
poetry left deep in it's skeletons.
i hope it's keys come apart 
& scatter like seeds.