Briardale Projects.

Briardale Projects.

I remember moving
sadly through each room,
trying to capture
and hold the emptiness
that once was filled
with my 11 years
of innocence spent
between these walls.

Dust motes danced
in the sunbeams
of curtainless windows,
and the floors were marked
across each threadbare rug
with brighter, flawless squares
marking where our furniture
had been removed.

I touched things that I would
never see or grow alongside again.

The window where the girl next door
came to ask me if I liked her,
and my tongue became a wedge of glue,
as my heart hammered "Yes!"

The corner where our puppy died
one cold November night
cradled in our arms,
with a long sad whimper,
I can still hear.

The doorknob to my room,
my sanctuary of childhood,
which now would only be turned,
one final time in farewell
as it closed on that
chapter of my life.

Tears welled as I walked
through our living room
now a cadaverous space,
once filled with laughing
and the daily chatter of family.

The kitchen no longer held
the smells of mom's apple pies
and Captain Crunch, milk sotted.
It was my favorite hangout
now emptied like a T.V. dinner tray.

They tore our house down, a year later,
it was one of many in the projects
where I grew up, my childhood home,
which I wouldn't have traded for
any huge mansion in the world.

They made our neighborhood
a golf course, and where my house
had once stood was now
a tiny hole on the eighteenth,
but the hole I saw when I revisited last,
was as vast as an ocean in my soul.

I wanted to go back,
but I knew it would be no good,
One seldom can go back, to what's gone,
time endlessly rearranges,
old familiar places and faces
moving on.......................... .

©-MFB III