Phantom Pain Syndrome

[71degrees]

Been there since last Sunday,
the abandoned shoe
in a 45 mph zone less
than a mile from home—

no one stops, no one cares,
it’s still there the next Sunday
and the following Sunday as well,
a fickle calypso of surrender

and you wonder where the foot went,
perhaps severed, bleeding, the owner erased—
and what about the leg, thigh, reproduction
organs, any eager thoughts cut-off like November
daylight, moving away from the owner
in a broken sky of January

Maybe the shoe is a concept of God: a gift
for a laborer, an image for a poet, a lost breath
of an asthmatic—

in search of innocence, you imagine
it was owned by the beautiful girl
you knew in 1977, she a mirage

bruising your ego, your manhood, more
smoke than substance, the definitive
production of lost virginity

as painful as the sight of the unclaimed
shoe, its history as mysterious as the missing
person that may or may not have existed