An Ode to Broken Hammers
[Erasure of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time]
Two Decades Before His Arrest, Ezra Pound Said, “Go in Fear of Abstractions”
Take this image and pry it apart,
Stretch out its contents and study its form.
Ask it to dance on the head of a pin,
and turn it over in your mind for another year.
Grind the image to a pulp under pestle and mortar,
Twirl it on your fork and gobble it up, wolf it down.
Press it into the tiniest mote of dust
and send it packing to some other sunray.
Dangle it in the light, the dark, anywhere out of frame.
Bury it in an anthology and abandon it in the cupboard.
Place it between your fingers, blow as hard as you can
and fling it into a world waiting on tenterhooks.
Give it my irises and your allergies,
Give it my neuroses and your smile.
Move it to the suburbs
and make a million more just like it.
Ship it off to war, make it fight for what it believes.
Forge it under pressure, violence, and shame.
Lock it away, put it on trial.
and carry it on your back for the rest of your days.
Place it upon your desk and kindly shred it.
Dash it all to pieces as you revise it into obscurity.
So, go on, take this image apart, but swear
you’ll suture it back together when you’re finished.
Reilly Dixon is a designer and writer for the Yellow Springs News in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He graduated from Wright State University in 2018 with a master’s degree in literature, with a focus on leftist fiction and theories of materialism. Occasionally, he writes poetry.