Cardboard Families

©  Cardboard Families                                  

Life-sized cut-outs so exciting advertise the movies trying...

To encourage the jaded public in city theatres.

Now you can order cardboard wizards, heart throbs and lounge lizards

To decorate your home with the other creatures.

Although they don’t discriminate alas they’re still inanimate,

Two- dimensional Tussauds figures, life size and imposing.

Indulge your weirdest fantasy and try a little ... origami?  

Paper lovers don’t fall asleep: they’re comatose-ing.

A young widow innovative had cut-outs made for husband’s funeral,

But later the grieving wife couldn’t bear to let it go.

He was the life and soul of the party and although it’s quite surreal,

The children even dress him up as Santa in the snow.

Young wives of soldiers overseas keep their ‘flat daddy’ near;

He’s just as tall as the models in the mall.

He might amuse the children or he just might raise a tear,

But he’s no comfort in dead of night when passion calls. 

Even President Obama is subject to cardboard drama,

The folks adore their avatar, or, he’s a target.

While others think he’s just divinable or place his head in the urinal,

Now Osama has bitten the dust, they have a new prophet.

And yet the families still live in cardboard city slums;

From Soweto to Rio Janiero, nothing much modified.

Obese people nowadays eat from cardboard takeaways, leaving crumbs

That the pigeons swoop upon, be it baked or fried.

I have a cardboard family that I keep in a cardboard carton.

Photographs of my former life and my former wife, we were so naïve,

Images of my daughter and son from high school to kindergarten;

Mustn’t linger for too long, melancholy rises – I start to grieve.

And it’s hard to just recycle and be done with endless sighing.

Anxiously, I await my progeny to call on the telephone.

Indeed there’s no denying that I am prone to crying,

For a man’s not made of cardboard but flesh and bone.