Mark
Back down
from the
mountains.
Back here
on familiar streets
looking for
familiar faces.
Back where
I suppose I belong,
even though these days
I don’t feel like I belong
anywhere except in my car.
Back when
I was a kid I didn’t think
much about things like that.
I just sort of lived day to day
doing kid stuff like soccer
and hockey and school projects.
Back then
it all seemed easier, like there were
no cracks in my life, no places where
my feet kept slipping through, like
they do now whenever I try to take a step,
whenever I try to decide how I am going
to move forward in my life and not
Backwards
like I am now, constantly thinking
of things that happened in the past,
things with my dad, like the time he
let me stay home from school and spend
the day with him in his cab and we couldn’t
let on to my mom because she’d have flipped,
especially if she knew that he let me drive the car
Back to
the depot, even though I was only twelve
and barely tall enough to see over the steering
wheel or to reach the gas and brakes, although
it was only two blocks in mid-afternoon so there
weren’t many other cars on the road, and it was so
exciting and I couldn’t wait to brag about it to my
friends at school and every day after that when my mom
wasn’t in sight, I’d beg and beg my dad to take me
Back again.