And When We Were Children… Alexander Hughes We were beastly and unashamed. We imagined our beards and roared and turned our teachers into lumber. We assassinated street lamps and shot bottle rockets through the windows of the kindergarten. We fierce red-handed pirates stole the old man’s cigarettes, his records, his ones and fives, his pornography and his sneer. We built fortresses in strangers’ trees, where we smoked and schemed small anarchies. We grew our tails long, pissed out-of-doors, and sharpened our teeth shirtless in the muddy creek bed. We stared down the sun til it blinked. At day’s end we sifted through the dead, shed our reptile skins and laid them to dry on the roof. And every night we shrank and returned to our parents, who stooped, sighed and shook in their heaviness, dust and insincerity. 2
Manastash 2013