I wonder if this old grade school
understands that I steal little
bits of myself back from it
even all these years later.

Despite the fact that
this building stole
a lot of my childhood,
leaving me with ******
noses, blackened eyes
instead of  good memories,
I come out here,
to write poetry.

The sun warms
the steel bench;
its  heat
softening the muscles
surrounding my crooked
spine.

My boys,
possessed of energy,
boundless,
climb monkey bars
or
slide down spirals,
maybe swing
for awhile.

I’ll do the same,
inside of my own
mind.

(Never forgetting the blood
I’d left inside.)

I write the line,
the lie;
“...stepping into silence.”
and think it a grand thing.

Recalling the morning,
standing outside
with the day’s first cigarette,
feeling that ‘connected to everything’
feeling.

Soon enough it
had all gone to hell.

Because, the more I thought
about whatever I’d meant
by: …”stepping into silence.”
the less accurate it seemed to be.

While outside smoking,
I’d gotten a message from
a co-worker.

The poor *******’s mother had
fallen down the basement steps,

So…

“I bet that fall wasn’t very silent.”

sloshed around in my skull for
a minute,
then,
the woodpeckers
started in on the eaves of
my neighbor’s house,
their machine-gun beaks
strafing the silence even
further into ruin.

Soon enough,
“...stepping into silence”
ceased to be poetry
and turned simply,
into some
jibber-jabber
that I’d scribbled
into a notebook
earlier this week.

Nevertheless,
it’s mine;
silent, screamed,
or otherwise.

I’ve stolen it back
from this monument
to my terrorized youth.

Here in the sunshine,
by the slide, the swing-set,
the dandelion baselines
of the diamond behind me,
my sons kicking yellow
with every step.

I am grateful for the noise.

*

-JBClaywell
©P&ZPublications 2018