foreclosure

I remember the hard
yellow plastic, short,
with a nose like a Viking ship’s prow
and a notched tail,
the cheap urethane wheels –
a Christmas gift that I
stared at for hours before
stepping on, falling off,
repeating, giving up.

Somewhere I watched
slow motion fisheye shots
of bare-chested kids
bombing through empty swimming pools,
flying hair covering their faces
and flowing like the absent water.

Later, there were checkerboard shoes
and corduroy shorts,
Black Flag and learning to ride.

Now it’s brutal
out in the Inland Empire,
a made-up name for the desert,
driving through abandoned
subdivisions – not neighborhoods,
no one ever lived there – dreaming
of things that never happened,
that I could never do,
a hero gliding
above the epic swindle.