Outside the treehouse window
Tiger lilies blossom like lollipops.
Over the fence, a girl in halter-top
Mows her butterfly-haunted lawn.
Sagging sweatpants reveal fabled lingerie.
Nigel guzzles a delicious ichor
Of Kool-Aid carbonated with Ramune.
Caterpillars of popcorn curl through his T-shirt wrinkles.
Harold’s jejune shenanigans do not faze him.
Strung across the ceiling like Christmas lights,
The soda pop top necklace jangles
Whenever he piledrives the beanbag.
Gary’s tabletop role-playing empires
Crumple before his gastric calamities.
Carbuncles erupt in constellations,
Beneath ballpoint tattoos and unidentified crust.
Kenny’s fetishistic pinball racket
Jitters and squeals above
The hypnotic congeries of the jukebox.
The licorice twilight of their citadel is eclipsed
By candy corn colored moonlight.
Their aching ears listen to sibilating cicadas.
Dawn splatters over the horizon.
The sprinklers begin their barrage.
Under an avalanche of game cartridges and trading cards,
Calvin is battened down and barricaded,
One hand gloved in a Doritos bag.
Those are pinwheels that were his eyes,
Still conjuring exquisite mirages.
The fort teeter-totters as Nigel rises.
Bones crackle like bubble wrap.
Soggy hair shellacs his forehead.
As sunlight trundles fulgent leaves,
He emerges, burdened with pearls
Of ephemeral memory,
And dandelion flyaway seeds windmill upward.
The cosmos has suffered a sea-change
Into bittersweet confection.
If he could only fortify the kernel of his innocence
And forsake the sloshing shore forever,
He’d perish in those enigmatic depths.
