Fourteen

Fourteen stands like an obelisk, mounted and towering

An inverted pyramid of burgeoning days of intersected angled lines

Expanding in opposing directions sixty degrees

In equitable divergence of new found land days

Wetting beaches as novel for numb pilgrim legs

Glances and looks, lottery tickets cashed across classrooms

Chalk boards and non-parental chauffeurs motoring about

With hymns of rebellion, sex, and recompense

In wait for pubescent mistakes lingering in the background

Of uncensored sounds making their rounds

Into afterthoughts magnetized and remembered in years lost

Antiheroic and puissant, potent and crucial that

Every sight, smell, sign from there to here

Stacks up in that inverted pyramid magnified like an exponent of then

Where every new sense no matter the year will filter through that angle

First, remembered always, the fog of the middle, but the beginning is so clear

Of all the love, the purpose of life flicked the flint in those days and nights

Sparks of start, the flames of heart set afire into pyres of years

Of all our loves and greatest fears exemplified smoldering down to die

Like pole vaulting up a ladder of Fahrenheit the flame will never

Streak as high on those Technicolor lives

Fourteen years and the colors change, spring has come and

Pheromones rage, car crashes looming and reading the next page

Of story books parents avert the eyes and now children can look

Without being explained why just diving in with barracuda swims

Floundering limbs flailing in choppy waters

Grabbing breaths in the undulating quarters of time where peace

Escapes into your soul in parceled flotation devices of control

Tossed out like Mardi Gras cups to the beautiful, the athletic and gregarious

The parade, the crowd thirsts to share in praying for fresh water

And not the salt spit out and thrust into the cult of vagabonds

And castrated masses sitting out staring at the prized ponies prancing

Inside the fences drinking from the well and the sun’s smell of

Peaches and cream skin and the secrets blooming in

The eyes of colts bucking and setting the trends and living in

Fourteen and on the scene to Sixteen, Twenty one and the fun is shattered in the ladder

Getting there and the patter of hallways has dissipated from an ocean into a trickle

And where have the vagabonds walked beyond the cripples

Seen the scars of every living fish, the hook marks and busted lips

All the same, with all the scales scrapped and raped as childhood abates