Poems

Childhood

When you were a child, you spun in circles
Just to make the world turn,
Back before your first sip of alcohol
When you used your small fingers to pick apart
The tiny honeysuckle flowers running up the school's fence
And you showed the young boy with the curls
How to draw the honey from them
How to reach up, despite your height, and pick crabapples off the trees
Back then, the thoughts in your head were only a small seedlings,
And they had yet to grow into the vines that crowd your mind today
Back when you'd go to the library to borrow the books you have yet to return
And you went to the movie store on Fridays
To pick out a movie and, if you were lucky, a packet of microwaveable popcorn too,
Back when popcorn wasn't a sin
People were still bad to each other back then
But you told yourself that maybe they were just having a bad day.
You had the skin of a child, soft,
Your teeth lined up in a neat little row
Back when you said the word 'love' and you meant it,
Back when you had no reason to believe that others did not mean it too
When you were a child, your parents told you
That you could be anything you wanted to be
So you dreamt of playing ring around the rosie with the stars
And writing the next great american novel
Of kissing the prince at midnight
And having a closet full of board games like the girl across the street
There was that one Halloween when your aunt put together
The most amazing butterfly costume
And, that night, you walked all around Kew Gardens,
Believing you could fly,
The streets did not hold any special meaning for you yet,
But sometimes things are better that way
You were careless
And sometimes you fell and scraped your knee
Or bruised your shin
But, back then, pain was something momentary,
Laying just barely on the surface of your skin
And, when your mother placed a band-aid over it,
You still had the knowledge that, with time,
Anything could heal.