Fine Motor Skills
A repository of comfort
It wasn’t built to factory specs
Made to be assembled in IKEA fashion
This reassuring piece of comfort
Hands high as a swayback horse
Standing there a sentinel unbowed
Where timeless tomes are packed in to be dusted
And then plucked from the shelves at leisure
Made from untreated, rough, hand hewed planks
built from raw material from the ground up
In some tinkerer’s garage away
from his newborn baby’s cries
That day
The buzz of the space heater warding off the cold and damp
The steel girders were salvaged from somewhere
Maybe they came from the Ax Man
All the nuts and bolts held fast with fine motor skills
And then it stood upright waiting to be used
But there was no use for it
just yet
Not even as a resting place for odds and ends
But we can use the money, his wife said
Put it online, someone will buy it
The buyer saw it online and he wanted it
This handcrafted assemblage spoke to him
Now you can have a place for the books you schlepped
stuffed inside boxes and garbage bags
The unfinished aspect of it all ended
Once and for all in one fell swoop
Make your books happy
Give them room to breath and to glow
Let them strut their titles and dust covers in glory
It has become more than a resting place for them
They share the same space with odds and ends, gewgaws and trinkets
What I look up and see sometimes is not detritus
It’s books I’ve read and will read again
someday, perhaps
Books I have yet to read
Items you know are there to be bidden
a threnody to time lost never to be retrieved
time slipping away, good times, memories lost and found in time
a testament to remaining time of which there is little left
Time has stopped being gentle
It diminishes me day by day
Yet this three-tiered tower has become a salve to my soul
It harks to songs yet to be sung, praise and redemption, spines cracked and broken, pages to turn
It has become my balm, this sturdy, handcrafted repository of books and things
My rock of ages gathered from wood and steel not made
In any factory we know but ingenuity
R.C. Mantley
About the Creator
R.C.Mantley
Rickey C Mantley--pen name, R.C. Mantley--works as an advocate among the decamisados ("the shirtless ones") in the Twin Cities. I also have a stage play and screenplay under my belt and I have a novel in progress.
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Ghost Ship
Ghost Ship By R.C. Mantley Chapter 1 Unmoored Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. So, I didn’t scream, I didn’t panic, the moment I realized my tether, my lifeline, had broken loose from the ship and I was adrift. At the same time, the coms (communication) link with the bridge abruptly went down. Thus, the symbolic umbilical cord was no longer attached. I watched, almost numb, as the spaceship receded. It was difficult to judge the speed at which I was moving away from the IGF (Inter-Galactic Federation) Bayard Rustin, a Class C transport vessel, where I had spent the last five months of my life as a member of a crew of seven. If I were on Earth, subject to gravity, I’d be free falling at the rate of ten meters per second per second. But every schoolchild knows there is no gravity in space; I was floating in the vastness of the cosmos, like jetsam bobbing on the surface of the ocean, but not knocked about by waves or batted around by the wind. It was a matter of seconds before the ship was reduced to a pinprick and then disappeared entirely. It was indistinguishable from among the other distant stars in the Andromeda galaxy. There was no sound except the exhalations of my breath. The lifeline that kept me anchored to the ship was just that. It was an oxygen hose. I had reserve packs strapped to my back. They were designed to be automatically triggered in case…in case the hose became severed. I remembered the training exercises. The hours spent breathing in the oxygen from the reserve tanks. It had an odd smell and taste, slightly metallic as I recalled. After the exercises were over, and we removed our suits and our gear, we remarked on the taste and smell. We laughed. We made jokes about it. At the same time, we gave thanks that the oxygen we breathed everyday was odorless and tasteless. And then this motley group of trainees I had bonded with, those of us who sought comfort and camaraderie after the stressful training exercises, would rendezvous at the Galactica. It was a watering hole for space jockeys a few miles off base. Beneath all the revelry fueled by alcohol our greatest fears were buried, deep and unspoken. Space is an unforgiving place and there is no return from misfortune.
By R.C.Mantley3 years ago in Fiction
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