Guy Biederman is a former peace corps volunteer, creative writing college instructor, and author of six books. He lives on a houseboat and walks the planks daily.
Invisible Shelf
We need places to put things.
We need names to call things.
We need to say what needs to be
said even if we don't know how to
say it, sometimes even if it doesn't
need to be said. So in the end I build
an invisible shelf, a shelf only I can see
where words don't fail, where rudimentary
skills don't mangle, where things I later wish
I hadn't said don't bruise or spoil. I can only
do a few things in this life, am doing one now,
building an invisible shelf where I can put how
I feel about you, so I can see with much love
what it's really about, what you mean to me
with no weirdness or misunderstanding or
wrong label. So if you were to find this poem
on the fiction shelf, or, this little fiction in poetry,
this avocado in the bin of tomatoes, this toothbrush
where aluminum foil should be, know that somewhere
in a market, in a bookstore, in a house that floats there's
an invisible shelf where sits how I feel about you, and nothing,
nothing else.