Recapturing Childhood Realities

                                        A family picture framed in calico living-room intervals; plastered to hollow ply-wood: collecting adoration while mounting an narrow staircase (the portrait froze an artificial moment on a non-existent timeline; your loved ones younger in their years). In southern Philadelphia corridors, evening hours dwindle delicately to dusk- dimly lit city street corners perpetually breathe in stale night air; fluctuating through noon-day seasons. Dry summer playgrounds of steel swelter infernally through morbid afternoon inflection, pigeon-peasantry and chlorine contaminated swimming-pools. Private grade school tuition; familiar childlike pageantry of holiday insinuation. The daytime schoolyard penetrates warm flesh-like pores thrice over, Italian mafia eulogies spread fervently throughout neighborhood front-door stoop vestibules.
                                       I mentally fornicated with distant bloodline relatives loosely over decades of rambunctious anecdotes and frugal baked-goods; twelve-year old burgundy marketed in cheap glass handled jugs. I rented a room deep within the hearth of salami and steak Stromboli central; the subway circuit sweeps through underground channels of uncouthly garbage and loose cellophane cigarette marketing.
                                      Miserably drunken over unkempt years of toxic sprees, overlapped between soul-soup-kitchen pilgrimages and Schuylkill river sponge-bath upheavals; the homeless are home-bound tonight to counterfeit warmth permeating up through metal sewer drains; aloft in an starless night-sky of native misconception. The locals solemnly make promises and misplace them with their card-plastic finances along midnight taxi promenades, returning lucidly home from center-city sojourns off the Roosevelt Boulevard; all lit up for anyone beside the awful tourists who Ride The Ducks and stay in five-star hotels lucratively betwixt Broad and Market.
                                  Someone forgot to count the minutes it takes to lose your youth, sell your primordial soul to the black market for a couple grand; reflect on your misconstrued principles, priorities, and mortality.

                                       (You cannot take "it" with you when you die)

                                 For years I wanted to die; and in a completely selfish way, I miss the freedom in living that way: in thinking that I had nothing to lose.

                                  A woman with soft limbs at her side; once a mother. Angelic features amid an heavenly visage. Darkened in bedroom pallor; she stretched scarlet bedsheets undauntedly with dainty feet; (she awoke from an long Winter nap) as an church bell pealed 5:30 P.M. from an remote courtyard, I made it known her reality in cold and doleful recapturing, "dear our children are dead, now remember your children are dead now"