Utopia.

Where I live
Seasons are experienced on the back porch.
Fifteen by thirty feet of Trex,
Upholstered seating,
And Atlas
Spinning his macrocosmic
merry-go-round.

Summer in the suburbs,
A breathtaking
Confinement.
Trading premature nostalgia
For a child’s sort of ignorance.
A c’est la vie natural high
Of melted bomb pops down your arm
And sunbathing,
Absurdly inconspicuous,
As the light reflects off the two way mirrors.
A season of
Stars swathed in peach-colored light pollution, of
Wishing the pops and cracks of the house yawning
Were boys throwing pebbles,
Of wondering
If prowlers had leaned on this same railing
Here before me.
And not being hasty to prove my late night
Paranoias
As weakness.

Verdant vitality
Wanes
Like a fairest sister’s early demise.
Inevitable
As it is with anything too brilliant for permanence.
The mass extinction of October,
Basic clockwork,
Gorgeous cataclysms evident
In the supernova of autumn foliage.
Woolen academia
Forces away
Supper under sun umbrellas
And leaves us
Watching the canopies confetti
The lawnmower stripes
Measuring our backyards.

Post surrender,
Icy eaves
Frost our hibernaculums
Like wedding cakes.
Uniting us with that serious beauty: winter.
Our observation decks are
Closed for the season.
In hot chocolate trances
We doubt the verity of such dangerous
Purity behind the Plexiglas;
Fingers curled around crate & barrel mugs.
Fortunately, we have the
Sudden influx of toy commercials
As reassurance.

It isn’t until April,
That docile, weeping thing,
Offers up several million prenatal heads
That we believe in regeneration again.
The forts melt into dirty, iced rubble
And the quotidian menagerie
Begins stirring once more.