Monday Night Football

The American football players
are carefully folding a head into a tight cube
as they rock up and down the field.

The head is so compact
that thoughts have a hard time moving in there.
The American football players

move the head instead.  The thoughts
end up on one yard marker, then another.
There’s no need for them to struggle free.

An American lifts the head and throws it
fifty-two yards for a touchdown.  The receiver
hands the head to a boy in the stands.

The boy takes the head home and puts it
on a high shelf in his room where it collects dust.
He thinks, sometimes, that he can hear voices

coming out of the head.  But it’s just a football
to him, a souvenir of a great moment.
The American football player gave it to him

and it will not do to have it speaking
without being spoken to.  So he eventually locks it
in a box in his closet where it can mumble to itself

of how it used to have enough space to think
and speak and curse those folders of heads
who trap expression in such minute cubes.

There was an expression it knew once: bread
and something, some entertainment.  It recalls
just that much; says,  I used to be a head, a brain,

I knew things and could figure things out.
I never thought I’d end this way: stuck in a boy’s box,
all square and silenced. To think I used to like football.

The head falls asleep.  It doesn’t dream anymore.
The American football players knocked that crap
right out of it.  The boy, on the other hand,

has exactly the right kind of dreams now:
football, folding, trophies, silence,
lock the accompanying disturbances away.