You look up at the sky and there’s all this primary fruit color and flavor, like a goddamned Fruit Roll Up on a Saturday morning of yore and you’re there at the streetcorner with your littlekid attempt at a yardsale selling a bunch of crap you shouldn’t have been selling to a bunch of jerks who shouldn’t have been buying, a bunch of cheap crap-plastic toys and knickknacks and gewgaws – that smelled like what the kid section at Kmart smelled like: Promise of a fun day. Promise of mudpuddle splash and dodging motorists and cavorting to the sounds of – wait, it sounded like this: wheeeee and the soft squeeze of breath gushing from puffed-out cheeks and the cotton candy somnolence of a little kid’s dream, a pink-tinted pink-shrouded dream of a better time that was always so far ahead it was thousands of miles away and therefore remote as movies at the matinees the mulletheaded dikey nonetheless sweet daycare ladies would drag the daycare children to, and the daycare children got to eat popcorn and drink soda and watch the matinee movie at, like, eleven in the morning – Carebears, STARE!! – and there was that one kid Jeremy, who was a little dunderheaded and dumb and he looked kinda like a cavekid, who ate way too much popcorn and puked it all up to the left of where you were sitting and even as an idyllic four-year-old you were disgusted and disturbed and it ruined your day and you couldn’t focus on Carebears, STARE!! over the revolting buttered bile streaming down the sloped redpainted concrete floor of the matinee theater and neither could the other kids and the girls began crying and it was a real mess and in your disgust you still found the nerve to point and laugh at the crying girls, until the sweet mulleted daycare ladies had enough and herded the children out of the theater even though Jeremy was chuckling like a little dunderhead chucklehead and none of the children would look at him or talk to him the rest of the day – playground pariah – and the sweet mulletheaded daycare ladies wouldn’t give Jeremy a snack at snacktime and he complained and kicked and pouted and threw a temper tantrum – jerk  – and made himself a raving nuisance till the ladies made him sit in the bathroom with the door closed like a little jerk and all the children laughed because Jeremy was a clown, a dumb slow Eeyore with a blonde bowlcut…

Jeremy had a bowlcut

and a stripedshirt

was dumb like

the way kids think

his dad got shot

somewhere in Panama

we never saw

Jeremy after that