Tuesday, May 7, 2019

Decapitations, or How It Used to Be

We had such a good time
At that park

Lot of fun

Six summers

I worked there for six summers
And they were--I’m telling you
The best summers
Of my life

Six summers
And only three decapitations

Not bad
Not bad at all

Some people said
We would have had less
If they had just
Tightened the bolts on the roller coaster
Every so often

But you know
I don’t like
To dwell on the past

The past is fun
Until you dwell on it

Then you start to remember
Things like the park-wide food poisoning
From that bad hot dog batch

And the wild dog that got loose
Near the tilt-a-whirl

If you just think about that stuff a little
You can usually find something
Funny about it

But if you pick at it
Like a scab
Sure enough
Stuff starts to bleed

But mostly you can laugh

Except when it comes
To the decapitations

Hard to see
The funny side of that

But I still don’t see
Why people need to keep bringing it up
Every time one of us
Wants to remember
Nice things that happened
At the park

Like your first kiss
Or your thirteenth birthday
Or the time you got hit in the face
With a baseball
Because some idiot with bad aim
Was trying to win his girlfriend a stuffed lion
And you had the bad luck
Of working the booth that day

There aren’t many bad memories
That can’t be dressed up
And made to look nice
If you let enough time pass

But yeah

Decapitations

That’s a tough one

It’s been almost twenty-five years
And I still can’t get myself to chuckle
Thinking about that

So mostly
I just don’t think about it

But these days
People don’t let you
Forget anything
While you’re trying to remember

It’s like everybody
Just wants
To be sad all the time

I’m telling you
It’s not natural

It’s not natural
For people to be able to
Just remember
Whatever they want
Even when their brain
Doesn’t want them to

It’s not healthy

Take the good
Leave the bad

That’s what I say

Take the bumper cars
Leave the serial killer
That ran into the funhouse
And wasn’t found for weeks

It’s the only way
To think about things

Otherwise you’d think
You never had it good

And who wants to think that?

I see the point
In thinking the way things are now is awful
But why think that way
About how things used to be?

Doesn’t make any sense

Not if you think about it
Not if you really think about it

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