SCHOOLYARD

I

Round-faced children
wearing baby fat and designer-label uniforms
wearing pig-tails and too many zippers.
Predators with PhD's or nametags
among a people who tell themselves
their failures could only happen in future dreams.

Sensationalists scream murder
and scour milk carton tabloids
shopping baskets
filled with TV guides and
water in overpriced faux-french labelled
plastic bottles.

When we were young
the forests were bursting
with sticks shaped like weapons.
Red Dawn in the back yard.
No one could afford a waterpistol
that wasn't an outrageous orange.
Ignorant of tragic warning shots.

Cops jumpy of anything black and hand-held.
If you walk around in Vancouver,
misty twilight dappled by red and blues,
don't pick up a poor dead cat to remove it
from the middle of the street.
It looks more like a machinegun
than a human head might.

II

New definitions.
Golly, Yessir, No ma'am, Doggone, swell
Top 'o the morning, At your service.
Pimp, Nigga, Suck it, Po-Po, All 'at ass
You sumkinda fag? Go fuck your mother.

Actions of evolutionary time.
Walk you home from school?
Go steady at the sock-hop.
Carry your groceries, miss?
Beat up that chink on the way home.
Passed her a roofie, she said yes.
Whatta you lookin' at bitch!?

III

I remember stories about
people who told stories 'round the fire.
I never saw a person like that
and our own stories were too busy
getting fed full of fodder lies
of what stories were supposed to be like.
When Chris Watson's turn came
he didn't have a story to tell
because there just wasn't time
and even worse for Robin Powers
because he forgot how to do it.

Kids with radar-jammed eyes
and calcium-deficient bone-encased sponges
like little storybook leeches.
Dreams desparately retained in tax-hike futility
the kind of dreams where they got
white puffy cartoon gloves and
even the wasps are cute.
Glazed over eyefulls of
future dreams profiteered
but never taught.
Imagineered in third-world sweatshops
at bargain basement prices.
I'm afraid of Andrew Lobbley
when he's old.
Pathetic like storybooks wouldn't dare scare up.
Even the dead are smiling.
Andrew breaking off low-cost reality
because he's invested too much.

IV

Kids playing russian roulette with
cellphone utopias during recess.
Trade the poor kids processed lunches for
the answers that the finaced 4-year-leased kids
don't need to care about.
The needy are forbidden now to dream
in order to save room
for those who despise dreams but
enjoy amassing real estate.

New disorders everyday.
Mutations or cash-resistant varieties.
Growing out of places unclaimed from neglect.
Whose myths are these?
Distress(c) and Depression(TM) and Suicide Bombings LTD.
Hip prescriptions and
Elders' Past Ignorance Inc. turned Substance Abuse(PG-13).
My cat died of cancer.
This developement scares me.