Behind the walls, you will remember,

Like summer’s first cherry—

The house with strange curtains

Where we once rested before the VCR

Licking frozen corndogs like lollipops,

Where you opened books,

The Naughty Bunny,

The ketchup children,

The Bay and the Small, Small Pond,

Chicka-Chicka-Boom-Boom.

When you opened books

Now tattooed with your scent and your scribbles

You hung memories on the tree of my mind,

Like socks rolled tight into donuts,

Like shiny, hollow disks.

You are strange, you are behind the walls,

You are under the blankets, down the highway,

Far from the bathtub where we both played,

The shopping car we both rode inside,

The strollers we both slept inside.

Daylight falls on another playground

I remember how you planted your body

High up on the slide, refusing to glide,

even for the Mexican boys,

Now you’re going down life fast, out of sight.

Milo floating downriver in a box in Milo and Otis

Couldn’t compare to the danger I feel

The lostness, loneliness.

Grinning and skipping,

You spare us goodbye

Even as the glass picture

Looks empty without your nudging reflection,

Your place at the table free of ravioli.

See the cars go by,

The cars go by, the cars go by,

Like Brother Joey in the psych ward upstairs—

“He’s upstairs,” you said,

Clear and truthful.

You love the bedposts, you love the storybook,

You love dinner, you love the movie credits.

A movie gives way to a list of names nobody knows

You see them and jump with glee.

And then

You had to leave home because

You couldn’t stand naked on the roof

Facing old cronies and boomers at the fast food joint

Who’d keel in shock.

You had to leave because

You couldn’t run naked down the highway

By the shop of the grizzled auto repairman.

You had to leave because…

Because…I don’t know,

I don’t know you

Like I don’t know names in the credits

Don’t know hearts,

Don’t know God’s secrets.

Well, you feel just like the credits

In a way—

You skip into obscurity at the end of the day

You keep on smiling

Broken-toothed and hungry

As you cut loose and skip away.

I looked into your house window through the car’s window

I saw

Faces

Drooling

Rags

Wandering.

Outside the windows,

The Halloween decorations

Collapsing.

They would put Christmas lights and Nativity scenes up

At Christmas—

Fragile light escaping the cracks

Doors with buzzers and alarms

Dirty lawns

Glass bricks cemented together

Never enough light to find our way—

Till I looked into you

Saw you jumping and grinning, gone from all this chaos,

Round and round and round in circles,

In a little world of your own, a world called David.