Pedantics
of old neighborhoods
by
Michael Amram
Time's
abutments work
once
in a lifetime
they're
the scenes of
childhood,
they're
the
foundations for
senility
hours
run long on a
psychiatrist's
couch
with
residue of
brain-pan
drips
screaming
down
halls
with Freudian
slips
for free
When
old neighborhoods
stop
telling you the way
thing
were, where curbs
where
black like the streets
they
gullied to lip
And
a smooth slope was
there
to get out of the street
before
texting and friends
used
their voices to cross
over
to meet
They're
cracks between a
therapist's
couch—gaps in
a
generation hours won't
close—when
it's spent like
gas
station gum
the
bonus chew that fell
apart
with baseball cards
like
the hours in winter
trudging
up Oak Grove
hill
for fun. . .
for
momentary lapse
to
run in Phy Ed. To
round
us—prepare us
like
“Lord of the Ring”
castaways
So
I'd remember the
salad
days, the times when
anything
was rare—and
accepted—because
no one
seemed
to care
in
the old neighborhood
it
was dog eat dog and
I
saw the fight, my first
close
up of aggression
people
must weigh
the
bare emotion was
dismal,
it left me with
a
weakness for humanity
that
grows ears that hear
no
evil to say
I'm
with my shrink—in my
happy
place but my hour's
up
and I prattle on like a
little
kid who's lost his
memory's
face
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