This is the zone of discards,
The domain of junk
That has achieved scarcity value.
This is the realm of the partial,
The three-legged,
The autopsy's trash can bin.

This is the world of things
Once perfect but perfect no longer.
We are not in the arena
Of ideal Platonic forms.

Colors
Do not live well in captivity.
As the years go by,
The things in the cages
All drab down to dungeon.

Voices
Do not live well without water.
I cannot hear the language of these stones.
The taxidermist's tiger
Seems to have forgotten its throat.
The wind is mute in the rigging
Of the bottled ship.

Abandonment
Is the death of the spirit.
Temples which are fed with no blood
Forget the ancient glory of their gods.

Tokens
Are not the things they symbolize.
The wishbone
Is less of a meal than the chicken.
This sarcophagus was Egypt, once,
But a stone box is less than an empire.
This is a feather
That once aspired to be penguin.
A penguin it is not.
This is an egg
That intended the dinosaur track.
It doesn't even make it to omelette.

That granted,
A good many of these incarcerated fragments
Recapitulate bravely,
Conjuring their wholes.

This intaglio vase was a villa,
These bricks a Roman road.
These gizzard stones
Were a species now extinct.
This scrap of flag was a conquest,
This cannister of sacred soil
A carnage ground.
This floating foot
Was once someone's delectable wife.

Though the artefacts do their best,
The jaded arsonist,
Imagination,
Does not ignite.
The bric-a-brac potlatch
Fails to receive its pyre.
We accepted the guide map at the ticket entrance
But decide against carting it home.

In the future, we, similarly, will be partial,
Mere shadows of our memories of ourselves.
We will be footprints found in once-molten mud,
DNA
Guesstimated from unusual pigs,
Software licenses discovered
But incapable of decryption.
We will be the black stone scavenged from the dragon's heart,
Wet with light, but incapable
Of either truth or tears.