I used to make for the train tracks at the end of our street
whenever I felt trapped in my life
and needed to dream of being rescued
by an Alfred that would never come.
My mother was never interested in doing things outside,
and my father only did on the weekends sometimes,
on the condition he wasn’t too tired,
and only if he got to pick what we did.
Us kids were told to not go beyond the sign that said Danger,
No One Allowed Beyond This Point. Quicksand,
but that only made us want to do it more.
In my case, quicksand had always been a fascination of mine,
and though I never found any out there,
I did find some train tracks.
As per usual, I got mad over something one day,
I don’t remember what, I was probably hit,
and took for the tracks to get away from my parents.
I sat on the rocks between the rails
and convinced myself I could see something
smoking in the distance getting closer,
and that I’d be able to hitch a ride.
A driver more than ten feet tall
and with legs like saplings
would exit the train and welcome me aboard,
ask me where I wanted to go,
and I’d be off to the desert,
which is where as a child I used to dream of moving.
Like a trapdoor spider,
I’d make my hovel in the ground somewhere
beside some Cacti-loving birds
and only come up for food and water.
That was my picture of happiness then,
to become something that never left the house unless it had to.
Well, I’m happy to pronounce I achieved my dream,
because that’s what I do now pretty much,
though I have to go to work to pay the bills
and sometimes get picked up by a friend who’ll remind me
being social is good for me.
While staring down the tracks I could hear the trees
creaking in the wind, it was so quiet out there,
and it was easy to imagine I was one of those trees
and could speak in the language of squeaks.
I just had to become still enough inside and out first.
Anyway, one day the parent police discovered I was out there
and they all packed into the back of the park manager’s pickup
and yelled for me to come out
while driving up and down the street
with their collective mouth affixed to a megaphone.
I ran off south down the tracks,
then kicked myself across some lawns
and bounced my way back to our trailer.
Coming up the drive,
the pickup full of heads seemed to play chicken with me,
and when it blocked the road sideways in front of me
and asked me where I’d been like a bunch of Nazis,
I pretended I’d been at the store pricing candy
I’d later buy with my allowance.
They bought it, and the pickup unblocked the way,
letting me pass and return to my bat cave of a bedroom
where for hours I played Batman records on a 45
and scared myself to death
listening to the megaphonic voice of Scarecrow,
Batman’s arched enemy, reflecting the collective voice
of corrupted parents I’d later try to bring to some kind of justice,
by writing poems that empowered my untrusted intellect
to view certain adults as giant, hallucinating toddlers,
and tip the scales of power
in the direction of a grounded and reasonably under-dramatic life
tempered by the golden weights of honesty and kindness.
We become who we were:
a defiant, cape-wearing pain in the tail with a bone to pick,
a bat-headed brat with an attitude like a catcher’s mitt,
a prisoner of a family war just trying to get home
without getting killed on the road by a bunch of drunken pricks
for parents who escape responsibility by calling
into the swallowing dark, not for us kids,
but for their own most hidden selves,
in a communication style different from our own.
poems