I.
Neighborhood kids shooting off fireworks
illuminating the tired smiling faces of distracted elders
casting long shadows that pop, sparkle and fizzle.
Dull fire. Vast dreams. The colors fade like
old flag fabric – the flag of our fathers' forefathers,
buried a top their sons and daughters.
In the humid, moonless, starless night,
blood shines black
like obsessively polished dress shoes.
Huddling 'round the campfire,
drinking beer as warm as tears,
old men and women recount stories of their America:
the one fed to us in digestible textbook morsels
long amputated from the The Long Memory. Stories
cast off like moldy bread on forgotten trails that have
long since been widened, flattened and paved over
in the name of progress.
These narratives
are not told in video games
or on standardized tests; not mentioned
in hyper-real 3D movies
meant to titillate and to tax and to strangle
the imagination, to erase the collective unconscious.
They are not found in the long shadows
and short light of sparklers,
nor in the ghosts living the cellars
and sleeping porches of houses
older than the dirt under a
gravedigger's fingernails.
When the beer is gone and the stories
are finished and the sparklers
are spent abandoned sticks in the neighbor's lawn
we will not remember them and will not be aware
that something sacred, something soul-tied
has been stolen and forever lost.