How it Happens

It’s like this: we wobble
through our days like the homeless,
each of us pushing a cart.
We collect mainly junk:
glass and tin, a dropped earring,
but, if lucky, we’ll find a buck,
dry socks, a perfect rose.
Into our carts it all goes, the sticky
and the stained, a haul
cradled by its metalwork:
swift on three good wheels.
The fourth wheel, though, is stubborn.
It neither spins nor faces straight.
But it’s our flaws that enrich us
as someone wise once told me.
And, sure enough, it’s that bum wheel
which scrapes the earth
so that we swerve
and slam headlong into one another,
our contents swapped, intermingled:
Your pink hairbrush
on my green bottles, my flannel hat
down at your feet, your scavenged tinsel
in my hair like starlight,
and two ragged lives entwined..