Peace, brother. I have always loved you.

Scarlet fever can happen to anyone. To me.
It passes through the womb of our mother,
deep and pulsing. Nourishing. To you, born

with a fragmented heart that dropped you dead
and dead again as you danced the hokey pokey
in our living room (we learned to resuscitate you),

with a left eye that drifted across your first horizon
to nowhere, let itself go blind, and a brain impeded
from regurgitating the blitzkrieg of new experiences.


Love and peace and harmony break apart, emaciate,
drain away like the summer creek under the relentless
badgering of second and third graders’ name calling.

Some chase him, laugh at his drift and ineloquence,
because Kids will be kids, Linda, the principal insists
to his mother. Nuthin’ we can do about it.

Even in this counter cultural here, this anti-right now,
decade of peace love harmony, kids belittle different,
parents excuse their hatred as Elysian self-expression.