My most frequent childhood home
was buried underground ages ago,
so I’m stuck lying about this house
I always wanted to live in.

When I was a kid I would hide
in the vacant lot where they eventually
built the thing. There were a couple of abandoned cars,
some big crosses from the bad, old days
and a bunch of lost children with beards.

They were just wandering around and swearing
that a train station was going to be built really soon.

I got a kick out of hiding in one of those cars. The idea
was to wait out those older kids who liked to follow me home.
Sooner or later the rain would turn red and those things
in the sewer would drag off anyone dumb enough
to still be on the streets.

After that I could go home
and watch an hour of The Simpsons on CBC.

My father would be in the basement suite
selling drugs to the young couple with tentative plans
to make it big on the pop country music scene.

My mother would be emailing her future husband
in the deep south or having conversations with me
where every word was spelled out so my father couldn’t understand.

That vacant lot
was a pretty good place to spend my free time,
which varied according to how long I could last at school
in a given six-hour workday.

Some kids would come through to smoke pot
or use one of those cars to presumably realize that sex
wasn’t going to be a big deal for a couple more years. No one
ever noticed me. I’d take a trail from the vacant lot
to the ocean and wait for them leave.

I wanted to learn how to stop talking. I wanted to get sick
of solitary confinement where the walls are thousands of miles
apart. I’d work on this stuff while dogs ran circles
around the puddles of lava springing up through the sidewalk.
While that weird home school kid tried to TP strangers on the street

I’d work on this stuff while dodging bricks
and thinking about some vacation to Missouri
that my mother wanted to take us kids on.

Not my father. Not a chance.

The vacant lot picked up a lot of the slack.
When I finally saw the house they built there,
I got the blood out of my mouth, crossed myself twice
for those two missing cars and spent three nights
living in the kitchen.

This was just before I decided
on changing the local scenery. Trade in the papier-mâché
for photographs as uncomfortably realistic
as the ones in those books
I couldn’t take out of the library.

That kitchen was glorious. It was at least
twice as big as my bedroom.

03/22/2010

Posted on 03/22/2010
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