The Sandbox

Here’s a little blue boy dressed in light blue size 2 jeans,

squirming in the sandbox, flailing and spinning,

with black speckles on coarse beige sands stuck between his undies and the denim,

     caught in his socks and overalls,

     irritating that soft childish skin,

         with the stupid face of way too happy children drooling everywhere.

And he looks a few feet past the grey dirt border around his sandbox his parents designed,

into the little area of grass between the bushes,

and sees a stick –

     a perfect one,

         so perfectly straight and manly and devoid of those

             pretty little curved branches.

So he somehow,

unstably,

gets up and

     picks up the stick

     and waddles back to the sandbox.

Raises it up

and with all his might shoves it as hard as he can down into the sandbox.

And two men in business suits,

     dark black businessmen briefcases,

         and clipboards

pause for a minute in reverent

         (self-conscious)

     silence.

         Grasping for thesis, in this simple,

             spiny structure,

and declare it

     “THE WASHINGTON MONUMENT.”

Image: The Sandbox by Jimmie Trotter, 2012. Acrylic on canvas.