Drunk Piñata

If you were to shoulder a heavy bat
& beat one today, many decades after—

blinded by a scarf, birthday boy—you took your first
mad swings at the whims of fate & thirst,

furious with whomever was toying with the rope,
gnashing, bashing the air, then what would grope

its way out of the cracked skull fallen in the yard
& scuttle off now among the shrapnel of tinsel & paper board?

A month of Junes? The arc of wages?
Wolf pies? Your little flashlights?  Moths in cages?

Legless toys, The Book of Thunders— 
a mother’s dress, its whiff of wonder?

Confetti of a poem confounded; the dumbfounded
tick-ticking of a clock, or bomb, nowhere to be found.