Carnival
I was fresh out of high school and looking
for adventure. They gave me the kiddie rides.
It was tradition. All day I strapped serial
snivelers into buckets with wings and flashed
my greasy shirttails at their mothers. I was
always a romantic. Like water grooving rock,
carousel tunes cut a canyon of cartoon music
that still whistles in my mind forty years later.
The pink dust of cotton candy slid over my eyes
like contact lenses. My lids stuck together when I slept.
Night and day kept turning round all summer
as if they were riding a ferris wheel. I learned
town from town bythe differences in the dirts
that plugged my nose. At every stop, I cultivated
a garden of generators and trimmed the black vines
spreading lie cables. I drank with those
who would never see the suburbs in a hundred lifetimes
and mocked everyone I would later marry or spawn.
In September I left for college. I have never stopped
dragging the neon arcades for my remains.
