Higher walls for someone else

Where are those kids
who roamed the glazed streets
looking for drugs in the rain?
who broke
into unmarked white
cars to smoke stale cigars?

that morning which
we came to know the twilight of
for the first time.
Fury, Rebels, running
continually
towards pinker horizons.

landscapes of all
the half-built houses we haunted
with smoke.
broken limits, melting mailboxes.
an ode to the aftermath
of adolescent sunshine.

some kind of secret
others would see in us, as if
we were marked: jaws tight
with Adrenaline-- we brought it
everywhere.
Idiots of the night--

never got it right. escapism
from nostalgia that ate
us up-- something we could own
for 15 seconds and be content
forgetting. little animals
followed us there--

side by side, stalled
as we wrang our clothes
from the storm-- we wouldn't watch
but they too would slick
over matted hair like rats.
and clean their teeth and overeat.

so it was lightning, thunder
true envy of the laws
as we bounced from catastrophe
to sedation in just under a
breath. a gang of Us,
ripping through green suburbs,

still understanding the magic
was fake; dreaming of it.
and the stages, where little
girls in dresses would come
bending around car doors
looking for trouble! and power!

and stages! where little boys
imprisoned in real brick
could protest nothing, except
the flowers unseeable through
milky-squares.
nothing real except that--

stage progression into
invincibility, or solipsistic
hell; adrenaline that sickens.
caught chasing the tail
of those animals (higher-
ups trying to push death into

our heads, through the soft-spot)
rabid, biting at the chains
a princess; recess drowned
with filthy smiles of filthy clowns.
where are those kids? --in shoes
too big. headed for taller walls

to rail against! thicker thieves
to hand the hearts off to,
steaming blackberry cobbler
falling through fingers.
and they're dreaming of this
as i finish my night with six lines

break into my fridge and, rape
the insides of that holy thing.
taking a bath in the steam, a maniac
on the right side of the walls.
still wasting time under lightning.
still under the flashes blooming.

the cobbler burns red,
icecream melting vanilla white.