Fred Aiken Writing

i read about the barefoot bandit
that terrorized and burglarized small towns in
the northwest,
who played a video game,
then thought, heck, why not steal and fly a real plane,
and he traveled the world without a driver’s license
while on most wanted posters and
with bullets shooting past him as he fled,
narrowly missing capture, narrowly missing death,

and i can’t help wonder what a teenage barefoot bandit
would have looked for,
or if all existential teenage crisis end in international manhunts in the bahamas