in the fifties sixties somewhere in the seventies hands ended up smelling like sweet sticky pine cone after spending a full day picking them up strewn and scattered all over your lawn
while a stray jet plane sputtered off to dusk slipping into the shadows of your basement
door to forget it all in blissful oblivion rummaging for the tonic water to add to the gin to make gin and tonics
in casual crystal cocktail glasses actual crystal glass stirrers displayed on top your half-built time life
bar just for the right moment just for the right occasion the mets always happening to be muted
on television always managing to find a way of losing (sometimes if you got lucky one of those streakers in high tops and big white boy
afros would suddenly show up running across to break it all up followed by the out-of-shape over-
weight security flush-faced, fish-faced, breathing heavily having heart attacks and them as well having
to be helped off feeling a little something like some sort of silly flamboyant out of control apocalypse)
with remaining lingering smells of smouldering barbecues going off like some sentimental sacrifice and slaughter in plush backyards of all the salesmen and ex-sailors and dentists and wheeler and dealers
and embezzlers everything kept in and not talked about while all developing some absurd dysfunctional
mythology unto itself (this became the real hush-hush not of the nice kind but secretive and sleazy
and sadistic and sublime) as you started to hear mosquitoes begin to get zapped electrocuted to death
in the flashing florescence of last breath dusk the ghost postmen and ice cream men already having
taken off as you'd come back out in your backyard in your pajamas after taking insane baths with mad brothers and feel the first dew of nightfall on your toes before you somehow found a way of drifting off to nightbirds in a flood of tears in the pitch-black dark of all your fears (of a holy and hysterical and hollow brooding of an unimaginable unfathomable being and reality) concept of mortality equalling a mourning
and murder and missing beyond belief of mother and father's eternal tragic and untimely passing...
© Joseph Reich 2010
Joseph Reich is a social worker from Massachusetts. He has a wife and handsome little son with a nice mop of dirty-blonde hair, and when they all get a bit older, he hopes to take them back to play, to pray, to contemplate in the parks and playgrounds of New York City.
