Do you recall that song?
Pasted together schmalz
1980s longings

I was found young in the room
with a gifted fake-wood
clock radio
Sun through two thin windows
we’d not yet broken
Light across the air-dust

Who was the one
you first
yoked it against?
with red dashing hair
and ceaseless freckles
across a tiny nose.
Lie on weird fabric-vinyl tiles
probably asbestos
in a tiny one-window bathroom
imaging a meeting
upon a wooden bridge
astride a wide-wrinkling creek
Bridge long gone
Creek (“crick”) beneath new brick

I’m a crystal shard
splitting your daydreams
throughout the years
I’m a sliced laugh
catching your catcalls
over various barrios

now it’s become true
that every life’s too
precious for me
to answer

now time’s grown bold:
every anger’s sold
more
than it bought

So I was wrong
So I didn’t know
So I’m your ghost
So we shape the snow
So down we coast

lying on a wide skateboard
with a Max Headroom graphic
on its underbelly
we take turns
we lie on the rough sandpaper top
see how many blocks past the bottom turn
we can drift
I shoved you against the small green hill
(preceding a fine white corner home
neither of us belonged to)
for saying you went one more block
than I chose to believe
you really had
You went home crying
I knocked on the door crying
arms in the air

little boys play soldier
in bombed out towns
and safe sound
snulgy-untouched ones

how can we all together
push against the evil
and towards the good
?
?

BW/AW
copyright: AMW