Anthony Bianco Poet Free verse

You can Never Go Back but I Did

I went back to my childhood home.
To recite a few secondhand lines at a first-rate funeral
to try and hold up the survivors' bones. 

A half century is a long time to be away from home.
Everything is off, smaller, colder, shadows in children's places.
I was surprised to see a new serf occupying my childhood home.
Most of the climbing trees were gone along with birdsong.

I rode around my old town with my most recent soulmate.
She's uninterested in my ghosts; she just wants something to eat.
I continued with the tour of the sad and pathetic.
"This is where I had my first six-pack.
In the bushes with the bad girls aside the railroad tracks.
The beer was warm and stolen and tasted really bad.
We used to throw stones at the cars that were piggybacked."

One day the train got revenge, gobbled up my puppy...
He was a curly-headed ball of happiness...his name was Fuzzy.
He squeezed under the fence; or somebody left the gate open...
Quality control was never quite up to snuff in our home.
I paid the karmic train with compounding interest.

"Those apartments used to be a green field
where we used to play baseball.
That law office used to be a candy store.
I guess you could say it went from sweet to bitter. Hà ha."
It's nice to see that the ice cream parlor survived
Although the service with a smile did not.


In short, you could fit my childhood into a half-mile square.
An 8-block nest, smaller but sweeter than the Vatican. 
It was in high school when life got serious
Some kids overdosed, 
some got pregnant 
Some did heroin 
Some just settled for hash
Some had big dreams
Some simply snapped. 
For most, it was our first taste of death.
A few ran away to make a bigger mess. 
Life turned from golden ribbons into tangles of stress.
Struggling with the undertow of tomorrow.
The chaining then slaying of innocents.

They say you can never go back.
The gears of time are without consciousness.
Time will not hesitate to chew your heart up.
Sacrifice you to the scrub of responsibility, measured fun.
Time invites melancholy, resists nostalgia. - 
It's fond of guiding memories 
onto train tracks, warm beer and dead puppies.

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