The Peanut-Butter Cookie
-So what happened to him?
-How should I know. It was long ago.
-A memory. Awful-is consciousness just circular memory? Is reality?
-Memory and will. And sex, of course, implementing both. Erase memory, you still have will. Reality is something different, though. I can see him like yesterday.
Are you sure you didn't dream him up? That what you told me wasn't a figment?
Yes, I'm sure. It's one of those things you don't forget. I was five, maybe six. It was frosty cold. Scalding cold, you might say-bearable if you had a stout coat. My breath came out in smoky plumes. It was New Year's day. Everyone was excited and hung from the night before. The sky was blue and cloudless. I was content.
-Hmmmm. Where was this?
Broad Street. Philadelphia.
-We were watching the parade. My first. There was something magical about it-those never-ending platoons of marchers in tights, all strumming banjos. The sun shone on their sequins and made them gleam....it was dizzying!
-Wow!
-...and the fake bird tails-peacock tails made out of fake feathers. Everyone had one. Like the tails of lyre-birds, they were...
-Of what kind of bird?
-and the banjos, strumming, strumming. And the curiously hollow horns.The sound came in waves, fading into the north and coming on again from the south.
-Jeez. Where were your mom and pop?
-I don't know. Suddenly they were gone. Maybe I repressed them.
-Gone when he came along?
-Exactly. I was standing on a curb in a crush of people...
-What was he wearing?
-An urchin suit out of Dickens. Out of Central Casting. He could have been Peter Pan's understudy. I have the impression he was barefoot, but that's hardly likely.
-How old....
poem by Morgan Michaels
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
No comments until now.