Real pianos have curves.
Real pianos are made with ivory keys and ebony shells
Managing to be both white and colored
Imperialist and independent
Morally disgusting, irresistible.

Real pianos need space.
Their guts, stretched taut, coiled leagues long,
Steel and bronze, tuned just so so sound,
When struck,
Sprawls.

Real pianos are a waste.
Hidden behind dusty shawls, scrubbed for fingerprints,
Topped with the flashing siren metronome and glass pressed flower frame
Sweaty from pretension, nervousness and screwing up,
Brass pedals tight from lack of force for fear of wood fractures
Locked, sprayed, stray paw prints silently wiped away.

The mid-afternoon light cast a ghostly shadow,
A fuzzy specter on the glass, turning it yellow and gray,
The color of flesh, long-deceased, with dust particles dancing on its grave,
Waiting, waiting to be brought back to life –
Turn the bolts on the bench, and a baroque gentleman whispers,
A man in e minor creates dissonance with a woman in D Major,
A deaf giant commands a choir of nameless angels –
Fold back the skin of the surface and some dying dolt stumbles, drunk,
A letter arrives in a tear-stained hand,
And a man in tails simply sits, as if to say with silence, “It is not enough.”
Open the mouth, and a man becomes a myth
A life becomes a legend
The ghosts escape, and dust settles in,
What have you done, they say, look what you’ve made,
A half-dead thing of misery, eighty-eight teeth and claws,
Three stalk-like legs and a giant maw
That crashes and gnashes, it must be held open by force –
What
Have
You
Done?
A monster, I
Threw my body over the giant lip
Mumbling, humming and nearly alive
The sunlight dancing and dust standing still, they cried, it is not enough –
I am not enough

Real pianos speak words,
So stick my Steinway & Sons where the sun don’t shine,
Shut the blinds tight so their darkness won’t fade,
(Though the dust always seems to find a way)
They will be their own coffins for when they are forgotten,
Waiting for she who is enough.

I will be buried in an un-tuned, upright Baldwin
Of plastic, Pledge, and American make,
Dead moths between the keys, dead cells along the strings,
The metronome drone and the glass frame gone.
A man becomes myth, a life becomes legend
But I will fade like a dying note;
A handprint on the window,
A quiver in the woodwork,
A glint in the eye
Of a passerby.