Home for the Summer

There’s a place of Magic

Just beyond the neon slide

And monkey bars

Hovering in that space

Before the field of grain

And concrete dreams

Become reality, a place of

Majesty for those children

Yearning for serious-ity

Naive as Icarus embracing

The flame

Those children unaware

Of what really comes after

The Junk Yard loses its Magic

Crushed beer cans scattered

About the whimsy trails

Misfits just as the kids rearing

Them back, aiming

For the piles of diapers,

Cigarette burned shirts, Daddy’s

Old lighters

Their arms cocked

Just as they’ve seen Daddy

Do, aiming for their

Mothers, brothers, and sisters

Their scarred and torn hands

Making the cans ammo

Once again

A bike made of sunset orange

By Oxygen Magicians

Strapped with papers crumbling

Telling visions and prophecies

From decades past

Those non-children cradle

The frame as they’ve seen Mother

Do with the newborns

After her belly has lost its swell

Making a home for the bike

In their makeshift fort

Every meeting, those non-children

Nurse it the best they can

Until they are called back to

The house that isn’t really home

An ancient car

Turned Restless Steed

The tears in the leather

And flat tires are unimportant

When it’s the first time behind the wheel

For the entire neighborhood

Another world, another time

When the sun hangs high

As the makeshift flag

Flown from towering metal

Proclaiming this home

The cans, the bike, the Thunderbird

Touch starved as their summer children

Once that flag is lowered

Revived with the daisies

Racoons and grain

Greeting the ever shrinking band

With a battered wing

To recognize the scars but

Not the worn faces

Hiding its rust tears as it knows

More have lost the Magic

Of the Junk Yard