In the Protection of Sylvan Manor

I’ll be swimming in the ditches
With the brimming snowmelt
With unexplainable fishes
And the plopped-down mallards belt out
For vouchers of pizza coupons
Surrounding the mailbox
And drowned in the lawns
There with me

Yes, some spiny heart grieves
For our occasional escape
In its artichoke leaves
That our bottom teeth familially scrape
Then discard on creased paper plates
As a knife extricates what’s released
And the heat levitates

Does your dad fall asleep
With the remote in his hand?
Does a digital beep
Promote gentle reprimand
To share all your love
Like the threadbare cloth of
Some T-shirt your mom wears
From a tournament of soccer you played
In 1998?

He bakes blank birthday cakes
In the grocery store flicker
And the hard plastic cases
He seals with a sticker
With a bar code and what’s owed
And in a gossiping snicker
The birthday-boy moms
With expired pom-poms gravitate
To personalize one
For her first and only prized son

I cannot sleep
With this language snowing so deeply
In my head
Dim soccer goals
And non-marking gym soles
With which I walk through instead

The archaic layout of the buildings that play out
My past as I’m lying in my bed
They will not stay out and so the only way out
Is to worship these worlds with my face red
Blushing beauteously
Rushing circuitously
Shaking with every endorphin
Constantly mesmerized
By all I’ve memorized
Leaving no place as an orphan

I perfect my conveyance by directing a seance
From an eighth grade computer lab station in the basement
Where the latchkey kids feel like a non-factor
And the black-ice skids call the strip-mall
Chiropractor
To the sweetly faulty parents
On their white-stained salty errands

Nonetheless, I digress
I walk through
Each janitor’s closet
And lavatory faucet
And desk configuration
And signature validation
On a permission slip nervously forged
Clarifying tenuous eras of my penmanship’s formation
The holy gradation

For the coaches that wronged me
And my sense of belonging
There’s a song I can taste when the braces are tightened
And the forceps clamp and the summer is heightened
And my mouth is the amplifier that voices its name

Well, no two-bit piece of shit interloper
Is gonna touch my world or molest my hope or
My kingdom that lingers in each drawer I open
When I open it up I’ll be groping at what is for damn sure
In the dimming of Sylvan Manor