If I say that I am an old man now,
what I mean is that my daughter
once pointed her finger at me
and yelled, Bang daddy, you’re
dead, and I fell down in a heap
of my murdered youth and yelped
in theater to her giggling applause,
this time without tasting a friend’s
blood spray against my profile or
feeling the weight of his expiration
fall against the summer of my fifteenth
year, no longer picturing the mural
of our collapse against the already
red brick wall of a school that one
of us will never walk the halls of again.