Summer Shock

those summers
in the hot pools
we walked up a long hill and over rises and falls
we knew where we were going but not what it would be like
although we had seen it before the expectations were
clean and the decisions were made by adults
we walked and felt like it was going to be too late
so ran a bit and tried to catch up with time
walking in a dream is always a little latent
for the dream may finish and the shock of waking
is like the shock of cold water
struggling up that dusty path
leave Richard behind or he decides at the last minute
that he was doing “something else” teenagers were like that
going off on their own adventures, forbidden tastes we were never
going to know about but it did not matter
for the hot pool emporium the excitement of the city in the sky
the summer projects of an middle aged couple
became the extended hobby of the unseen hand of a wrinkled man
who just could not stop building for his dead children
the summers we spent on that hill feeling singled out
as we took the cover off and slipped our feet into the thermal wonder
the heat was supposed to relax and make you stronger but it only
made you exhausted
feeling let down arriving last and then left out
you wander off alone
as you try to fit in with the others
eventually childhood ends but it is not like a movie
loose ends are left unfinished
the unknowns are not carried with you,
as you learn to keep memory you realize how to do things
what the results are and have to do them again endless days spent
at the coal face of debts and what you have to do
the man who stole the innocence was never gentle
he pulled you out of the memories with the same sudden shock of the real
that makes dreaming metallic and childhood inaccessible
memory is like that
it no longer matters
the evening approaches and the adventures had to finish
but the dream ends suddenly and you find yourself back in
the web of your own making, the decisions you came to to solve
the mystery of the frameworks, the banker smiles as you sign the
documents but that is the last that you see him
and now its just a number that reduces ever so slightly
year on year a you fall into a skin that never stops growing
and your children carry babies who have different aventures