Fred Aiken Writing

life is like a jungle gym in your backyard,
one day you wake up to it being built
by your beet-red, sweat-ridden dad,
who cursed the gods of instruction on how small of print
the instruction pamphlet was,
who he blames foreigners for, for some inexplicable reason,
then you play on it all summer long, maybe a little even into fall and the first few warm days of winter,
then you wait, anticipating next summer,
only to forget about it for the next fifteen years,
go off to college, the jungle gym set deteriorates in the backyard,
birds defecate on it, spiders make silky homes in its crevice,
the foundation sinks into the ground, further, deeper,
when you go home during break
and look out into your childhood home’s backyard,
you don’t even see the jungle gym, it blends into the background,
then your parents retire, your dad wants to move him and your mom into a retirement community,
a cul-de-sac of townhomes where all their neighbors are 65+,
and they sell your childhood home to a gentrified couple
with modern taste, who wear overalls ironically, and drink homemade beer,
and they tear down the old jungle gym
that you no longer miss, because it no longer exists