I Dove Headfirst Into Your Bleachers Without Thinking

I Dove Headfirst Into Your Bleachers Without Thinking

 

I wish you were

my camera scar

 

instead of my everyday

flesh wound

 

I wish photography

hadn’t got in the way

of our trick shots

 

I wish this poem was better

then it’s been

 

but it can’t help itself

tonight

keeps missing almost all of its

jump shots

 

I wish it’d stop doing that

naturally

and hit things

 

but if we got what we wanted

there wouldn’t be any wanting

 

and you can’t run a world without wanting

 

or maybe you can

but if you could

I wouldn’t know

 

that world,

it’s all alien

to me

 

my world’s held together

by wanting

 

like a scalp wound

held together by

a blunt camera lens indentation

and glue

 

I watched something like that

happen on TV last night

 

and then I watched it

a hundred more times

over and over again

 

when I was a kid I watched

a movie in which a young

Gary Coleman lived in a locker

 

not that this has anything to do with anything

other than: this; happened. too.

 

pretty sure I only watched the locker house movie

once

 

details can be fuzzy, but I know what

happened after

 

Gary Colman grew up to be an older version

of Gary Colman

 

the locker he lived in grew up

to be a photographer

 

I grew up to be the guy

who dove headfirst into your bleachers

without thinking

 

the crowd screams like a bucket of

Alanis Morissette songs

 

as I limp back to the locker room

to bleed all over everything

 

until the next game