The muddy merry-go-round
spins me around,
upside down with melancholy memories.
It makes me dizzy,
with rage and pain.

I teeter,
and I totter
on a paint chipped plank.
It sings squeaks
that pierce my soul,
and taunt my core.

Dangle by my neck,
on the steel jungle gym-
a haunted maze.
I tumble down it’s winding slides,
in an empty daze.

I’m lost again,
I scrape my knees on metal fences
to escape.
The blood rusts worn woodchips red,
and softens my fall.
Beneath me,
green grass grows dead,
molested brown.

A sparrow’s set free,
from Pandora’s sandbox.
She soars over me,
with cries of hope
muffled by
black caws.
Hope escapes me,
in a sandcastle tragedy.


Wind echoes through me,
it pounds my drum.
My heart beats against my rib cage
like a basketball on chalked pavement.
I quake and shake,
to the rhythm of tall trees;
pine scented anxieties.

Swing sets rattle my thoughts,
they fly me high
above my past.
This pain in my heart is chained,
and meant to last.
I pump my legs in protest,
high above the atmosphere,
the suns icicles shine down,
they freeze my bruised fingers.
I cling to twisted chains.

Cold clouds are too grey
for my blind eyes to see
past the “should’ve, would’ve been” horizon.
All I feel is fiberglass splinters,
from silver picnic tables lodged
deep where ignorance, cradled by bliss
once hid.

I play on this ground,
as a carved out coward,
until the nights shrink,
in wintry defeat.
My innocence dies,
with the begonias.
Streetlights spotlight
my snowy grave,
frozen,
forgotten,
and trampled on.