When I was eleven years old
I took a weekend trip to heaven.
It wasn’t like you’d think;
it wasn’t white and fluffy,
there weren’t trumpets and harps of gold
that serenaded our footsteps.
No, it was actually my darkened
neighborhood cul de sac,
the echoes of the yelling of
“ghost in the graveyard”
bounced off the front windows of
the houses that encircled us.

I guess in that sense you could say
that for a fateful night heaven and hell
made up and buried the zero hour hatchet
to form a 3rd, darker and funner location,
one that kids could hide from each other
by laying in the grass, one where spirits
and scraped knees conjoined
to invent new life reincarnate.

I have never heard more worship-filled
sounds than the ringing of my doorbell past 10 PM,
and I have never seen an angel like the
10 year old boy with a bleach-blonde bowl cut
singing to me, “do you want to play night games?”

When my parents were kind that day
or at least asleep I would put on
my best shoes and run into my driveway,
and faced the star-filled colosseum with
6 other middle school boys;
the possibilities seemed limitless.
Those times I wasn’t a girl or a boy
but simply a phantom and a gladiator,
and I knew not of life or death
but only of the games that went on into the night.

We competed in trials and prayed
to not be found, if we were extra lucky
the soldier-bearing adults next door would
make us s’mores like the lords we were,
doting on us as if we were eating our last,
or possibly very first meal.

We always knew we would resurrect again,
and that with the morning came the sunburns
on our faces and the colosseum would
morph into concrete once more.
But until our midnight deathly escapade finally waned,
we rolled in the grass and
held hands and danced as
the heavenly ghosts we were.