Our Town

We built our houses from a webbed maze of arrows

I drew on a whiteboard with a dying blue marker

This is my house,      

he whispered, circling a square where the lines intersected

            Then this is mine

                                                I circled the one above his

            We began to sketch the staircases for each other,

and furniture, attics, and trap doors

           

            He drew his neighbors, a factory, and I drew the smoke

                                                My blue lines wobbled and curved,

            His green ones were straight as our skyscrapers

           

                                    And we could draw anything,   for it was our town

So I gave him shoes for his feet, and he built a slide to connect our houses

We had turned a grid of nothing more than right angles

Into a place only for us,

                        Where trees grew where we needed them to,

And the pad of his thumb could erase all my mistakes

Where disputes could be flown away on a spaceship,

And separation was only our slide wiped away

                        We still draw together       sometimes,

                                                            But long ago we erased our town

Something was buried deep beneath our foundations, though,

                                    And his eyelids flutter as he remembers.