17

I once was

The loneliest boy,

Dust bowl swept hair,

And skewed eye slant,

Patchwork quilt,

Masquerading as pants.

My manic musings,

On diary sleeves,

Like teenage tattoos,

On battered loose leaf.

Still nobody, really,

Took notice of me.

I once was,

17,

My locust hum,

Of blistered feet,

Fast legs to nowhere,

And no one to meet.

Once, I dreamed I’d steal

The ice cream van,

And serenade

The neighborhood,

With distorted strains

Of

‘Fanfare For The Common Man’.

But I lost the nerve,

In haywire verve,

And was told in a panic,

That my brain was manic,

When I was 17.

The adroitly quack doctors,

Rolled out the white carpet

For me,

Parading my crazy

Of dry subtle wit,

In between fires

Of

electroshock fits.

They hazed me on a cocktail,

Of Thorazine and Coca Cola,

While I could barely breathe.

Hey daddy,

Why is everyone

Looking at me?

But that was me,

At 17,

Building a wall,

No one could see.

I’ll never forget,

The window there,

Dirty from tears,

Framed in despair.

I waved to my father,

And he waved backwards,

Head bowed like a lilac in an impromptu rain storm,

Crying for me

As the caged up windowsill,

Bartered for my sanity

At 17.

I’d write

What I called ‘poetry’,

But Dr. Macbeth,

Ruled it lunacy,

At 17,

Foiled and failed.

’Ramparts and rages,

Decaying in stages,

Shall rebound it’s fervor,

While forever we sleep.

Ramparts and rages,

On ink mottled pages,

Shall renounce the message,

Encrypted we keep.’

I wrote all those words,

To set myself free,

From the prison of self,

At 17.

But I was barely a cog,

In the meantime machine.

Yet in the most winsome way,

People were looking at me,

This girl named Karen

And this doctor named Steve.

A few months later,

They said I was well.

So I sauntered a bit,

For show and for tell.

But I knew that I

Would carry the weight,

Of irony’s cunning

Turn of defeat.

I never did track,

That Ice cream van down,

But often I wished

It still was around.

I’d hook up cassettes

And ride ’til the dawn,

To shuttered up houses,

Asleep in the sun.