Backyard brawls
and sunflower gardens.

Bezzled nights,
twinkling jeweled fireflies,
musky, humid air,
the tickle of rain on your cheeks.

Washed away,
down
the
drain,
youth,
gone and can't be recaptured.

Fistfights
in high school hallways,
tumbling in stairwells
with the beasts of our fear,
and the rolling thunder
of adulthood smashing
against our minds
like tropical waves against
arctic icebergs.

Youth, again;
mother's warm body
cuddling together
in the morning replenishment
on a spring mattress
that is continually sinking down abyssally
where boy and mother
cope with the aftermath
of the brokenness
shrouding their home.

**** drifting up to the ceiling
as we drank our full
of Everclear,
bought by fathers
who's lives had been beaten
down to a depressed mattress
in the corner
of
a garage
speckled by oil slicks
and draped by fiberglass
falling in curtains from the ceiling.

The absent smell of crack in the air.

Sunday breakfasts,
grandma in the kitchen,
mom in the basement,
kids farting around in their rooms.

Mom's curdling yells ripping the house to shreds,
as she sought peace,
in a quiet, and moldy sarcogophous.

There is a place where bombs
and mortars fly,
where a smile is as hard to find
as a mosquito in a desert,
and self-hatred is easy to come by
when regret blankets your mind
with every sand-choked breath.
And in this place, time crawls
by only springing to life when happiness
blooms, and idling when emotions
are sautered, and the search for feeling
is like waiting to get bitten.

But in this place,
there is a garden,
where youth and adulthood
collide, where the sunflowers bloom
once more, and the blood spilt
before the war began, gives life
to the seedlings,
and the soil is not so rotten
as it has grown older and tired.

The mind, finally centered
among the chaos, finding
its concrete horizon in the oasis
of a centered self,
centered finally,
in the midst of this brutal
and beautiful disaster.