I remember a way-back when
through the golden gate of our childhood
where the warm grass faded in the pulsations
of our summer-dew toes touched with a light
thought of joy, an innocence some may say
but yet an innocence that may be reclaimed
in words like cardinals flitting redness
in the shades of some elder elm whose branches
are tensile and frail against the season of tallow leaves.

I remember a way-back when we ordered our lives with play
without becoming too furious or hurt, a little bit of star-dust
in our cardboard moon-suits and a breath of happiness after
a supple rolling down a blustery knoll one day in ancient autumn.

School was incidental. No kid would ever talk about fractions in games,
no middle-schooler longed for the dreary drudge of idiot lessons coupled
only by the dubious authority of some goof eager to impress young minds
with the textbook religions of some corporate publisher. And how the
blossomings were, when the girls took on the pantomimes of young women,
remember your first love? The one the adults told you was a crush at best,
but how you pined for her and even drew a pink heart around her black and white
yearbook picture to lend color to what you saw beyond official photographs?
The boys were comrades in arms, the girls mysterious scents on the edges of
some exotically foreign wind, and your serious old relative had to drive miles
out of his way to pick you up from the baseball field as the sun became a bonfire
in the auburn sky.

I hope this was you.

Not some cigarette-pawning letch dressed in grunge rags, seconds from the drug scene, who tortured voluptuous women with bra-strap snaps and murdered small animals with safety pins and purloined lighters.

Regardless,
what became of us? I don't mean
who's job is what and who's wife
does how many sexual positions
after returning from an office morgue
with the stink of dead lives shrouded
about her rubber hands. I mean,
as in the question of a simple child's sky,
'why?' Why the massive insurance coverage
for lives that have lost their glow,
why the massive work week for an economy
that fucked itself with its own greed,
why the planned diminishing of human value
in the spirit of oneupsmanship that leads
to only more and more oneupsmanship?
Why hold children against their parents
in the workplace, why hold parents against
their children in the social scene of shuttled
conformity, why design a rich world in order
to become miserably chained to material?

Other questions arise, ones that are perhaps cryptic to the novice non-writer.
Indeed, these questions are not meant for the non-writer.

There is always an answer to any of humanity's problems:
childhood.