Everyday Majestic Musings

Bright colored lights, strung joyously, shine
and cast their glow into the calm of the star-filled night
as a chill wind nips your nose and mine,
the expression of this budding winter's coming frozen bite.
This street I've often walked before
whose neighbors never miss a chance to share the season's cheer
has dressed itself in strands of Santa's festival decor
and calls to every one of us, "Happy Holidays and New Year".

Little man,
the bat cat,
sitting on
a flat mat.
With your vacant stare.
Head is filled with air.

My childhood sometimes feels lost, hidden behind windowless walls
but the right signals can defrost that frozen time when I was small.
Old friend of mine (maybe he's still?) from childhood writes poetry.
He doesn't rhyme his lines. By will, he pours his heart out differently.

He writes of longing, sadness, blackness, things I've never known about.
I only know of our shared moments, most with pleasure, one without.
I carry one stain, heavy-stomached, hoping he's forgotten it,
praying that his mind's eye looks right past a child's angry fit.
But all the rest, though I've forgotten most of them, I feel were joys,
with sunlight streaming down upon two young super-heroic boys.

The words that wake me are the ones that take me back a thousand years,
when video games had no saves and TV sets had rabbit ears.
Sometimes he writes of childhood, his childhood, not mine,
and there a glimpse of old cartoons makes knots of memory unwind.

I have this memory, the barest memory, of sitting on the floor.
We're facing a Nintendo screen, our backs turned toward your bedroom door.
The game I came to see, remembered hazily, I know was called Pro Wrestling because I've looked it up.
With Star Man, Panther, Kin Corn Karn, 
King Slender, Puma, Amazon, 
and Fighter Hayabusa too, 
all in a square ring colored blue,
at character selection you
would take Star Man, then savagely
backflip the stuffing out of me
until the pixel referee
would pound the mat and count to three
and say my guy had had enough.

And though my memory's a stew
and barely holds, like wet tissue,
and I don't know what things are true
or if I really was with you,
there's also distinct residue
(but in a good way, for the rhyme)
of both your mom and bro Rabu,
just blurs, erased by passing time.

And somewhere else inside my brain's a fuzzy flash of drinking milk 
and marveling at its new flavor, never having had its ilk.
It's like my inner wrestler
had never tasted regular.

(We drank Lactaid. I don't know why
that was the milk my mom would buy.)

I wonder if the novelty is why I keep this memory.
But I think that drink converted me.
Lactaid now tastes too sugary.