I'm a Prisoner Trapped Inside a
Little Rectangular Marvel
Which knows, to six decimal ...'s,
My position on Earth

And the irony is that...
Electronically found,
I feel lost.

Way before we knew about
Jeep *** EssSs...
I lived 300 miles away,
In a little town called
Bettendorf, Iowa.

Few days after last
Christmas.
I made the journey
Back. To the
Former.
Place I existed, survived,
Lived, thrived (albeit briefly)

I took my family with me.
Or, I went with my family.
The four of us in the same vehicle,
Anyhow.
300 miles in December.
There was snow everywhere
Else. Not on the road, thank
You.

You leave bits and pieces of
Yourself in the place that is
The home for your feet, blistered
And toe-stubbing sidewalks and
Your hands grasping frozen Gym-
Door handles on Minus 10 Saturdays
When you bundle up and slog 1.3 miles
To play Dodgeball all Saturday afternoon.
(And returning it's twice as cold and dark is
Edging its fangs over the dim, muted horizon)

You sweat in the summer. Profusely,
Drops of the stuff watering brown
Grass. You bleed in the snow,
Stark red on even pastier
White, though it feels
Painful only in the abstract.
Sometimes numbness is better
Than painness.

You get blisters from raking leaves
In that season that seems
To have gone palavering somewhere
East of here.

These fringes of leavings, like
The tiny toenail clippings you spy
As you use a foreign bathroom, balefully
Eyeballing someone else's Medicine
Cabinet of Curiosities.

So we went to the place
Formerly known as home.

You can travel a linear or
Non-line-like distance back
To the place where you cut
Your teeth on life, and life cut
Its own bicuspids on you, but fading,
Fading,
Only the shimmering
Ephemeral memory of an
Equally diaphanous memory
Of those teethmarks exist.

Or, succinctly put:
The past is dead.
Long live the passed!
(But not the vaporous
Kind)

Still, we pine for the earlier
Times, younger and much,
Much more innocent, gull-
Able, even: When time had
Not yet painted and varnished
Us so much, the years piling on
Our faces deeply and thickly,
Lined canyons of worry criss-
Crossing our brows, the feet
Of those ****** crows nestling
Where our eyes end in points;
The sagging, the
Lowering of once springly,
Spritely flesh. 3 chins.
Since when do I need two
Extra chins?
**** you, Gravity!
**** you to Heck!

We travel back on new
Roads over the great
Old ones that used to be
Concave asphalt trips to
Anywhere and Nowhere
Special, they all were, even
The ones that led to hilarious
Dead ends.

Wow! There used to be a
(Insert memory here)
But hey! Lookit that!
A Yarn Barn. Hmm.

And oh! I lost my
(Insert memory here)
In that very back parking
Lots of Tots? What kinda name
Is that for a Pre-School!
Open on CHRISTMAS? Whaaaat?
My hometown has lost
Its mind.

And then silence, as the
future that passed us by
Reasserts itself so strongly-
It might as well be screaming
At us from useless billboards
Selling crap we don't need.

This place is a foreign
Country to me. I don't know
When it stopped being home
And now, I really don't care.
Let's do this thing, family, this
Familial obligation, and then kick
The stupid dust from this town
Off our tailpipes.
Go, Bettendorf!
Go, Bulldogs!
Go, next-town-over!
Go on with your bad
Selves.
Because, people of these
Towns, in 30, or 25, or 12, or
4 years, you'll blink, and find
That you no longer recognize
The place you can't call
Home any longer.

It's the week of Giving
Thanks, and I'm thinking
Of the magical place of
My Dreams, the
Dream-state I existed
In my childhood.
Google maps is SCI-
Finite, and does this place
Justice like a squid
Quoting Revelation 1:
9 - the Island of Palmos.
But at least the squid
Was half-right -
Middle Park Lagoon
Had an island.

It wasn't just the little farm
Pond full of alligator snappers,
And indelible fish (carp, anagram:
Crap)
It was the surrounding woods,
The Leopard Frogs I could not
(And really didn't want to)
Catch. It wasn't the shoe-
Stealing muck-mud, the
Barely-4-foot deep water.
It wasn't Duck Creek flowing
Next door, flooding often,
Its waters spilling into the
Waters of the Lagoon, depositing
And withdrawing wildlife
At will.

It was my escape-pod in the
Mysterious Spaceship Earth
That was 1968-1984, for my Dad
Ed Scheck, was Supt. of Parks
And Rec in Bettendorf, Iowa.
He oversaw all the parks, the
Pre-Waterslide-Pool, the Bike
Trails connecting Davenport
To its bro/sis city.
My Dad had to work a lot
And me in the park was like
Me visiting Dad.

The Lagoon frozen when we
Had Iowa winter, and a very
Popular place to skate. I think
I loved the Lagoon more frozen
Than liquid. At night, I would
Cut through the houses on
Fair Meadows Drive, listening to
KSTT-AM blasting on the speaker
Attached to the light pole.
It was the scariest part of my day,
That little freezing trip from
Lagoon to Home.
And about the best.

In 1979, at sixteen, I applied
For employment with the
Parks Department, and that
Meant summers working at
Palmer Hills Golf Course.
And, winters, supervising
Middle Park Lagoon.
I got to skate out on the
Ice, the ice that would turn
To the watery body I loved
Most of all, and miss, to
This day.
From 1968 (5) to 1984.
The math doesn't add up;
Magic has no columns that
Add up at the bottom, because
Magic is bottomless.