My bicycle is broken.
But it's ok.
My dad can fix it.
He has a bag of wishes that he keeps his magic tricks in.
And if I hit a rock,
my dad, he's got a box
about the length of our garage,
where he keeps bicycle band-aids, just in case a tire pops.
And two rungs below,
among the dust, there glows
a bucket cold with nuts and bolts.
And when his hands form cups to hold
these rusty old metal fillings,
they turn to chunks of gold that can hold together buildings.
In my backyard,
above the rocks,
he built a house among the feathers.
He brought me closer to the heavens just by slamming boards together.
In my backyard, there's a tree with arms that seem to scrape forever.
But as perfect as that seems, my dad built wings that made it better.
And he built this giant bar
that goes straight across my yard,
with these legs that dig hard
into the ground and stand guard.
And from that bar, he hung these swings.
And when I'd swing, I'd pump so hard
that I'd push the clouds apart.
And at the top, I'd stall,
and right before I'd fall,
I'd kinda float,
among the stars,
on the ends of iron ropes.

See, my dad built a kingdom,
without making a single metaphor.
His bare hands drew life from a backyard.
My childhood was spent on the edge of a pendulum,
stretchin' out my legs,
tryin' to reach
that
star.
My dad was a magician,
a mathemetician,
a blacksmith-beautician, patchin' stitchin' fact and fiction.
He had this mad ambition.
And pure love.
And he may have been the last thing that I was sure of.

See, my father isn't perfect.
He's a whole bunch of problems
that crept up to the surface, as they piled up in corners.
My dad didn't know that this world had nothing for him,
so he kept reaching upwards
towards
nothing,
forests.
Fuck it.
Torches.
Burn 'em.
He used to have this shit down pat -
this, being a person -
but sometimes it seems like his life wasn't lived on purpose.
My dad was a huge, fuckin' enormous fire burnin,'
but my father's leftovers, forgotten in a thermos.
Room temperature.
Unused, underdone.
My father had a wife
that my dad used to love.
My dad, he was a genius.
And my father is one too.
But see, my dad, he had ideas.
And a buncha shit to do.
My dad he was a dreamer -
dreams so big they don't come true.
And now my father's mad, 'cuz my dad didn't do it. Now it's through.
My father is a whole bunch of unfinished projects -
walls half primed like they dried when the tide came.
He's a boat
in a backyard moat of overgrowth,
a pair of rusty motorcycles dedicated to a driveway.
He's that bar,
where the swings used to be,
back when I was too young to see anything he didn't show me.
Back when he would lift me up, so I could dream
without being distracted by the solid ground below me.

My dad built a kingdom,
without making a single metaphor.
His bare hands drew life from a backyard.
My childhood was spent on the edge of a pendulum,
stretchin' out my legs, tryin' to reach
that
.
My dad was a magician,
a mathemetician,
a blacksmith-beautician, patchin' stitchin' fact and
fiction.
He had this mad ambition.
And pure love.
And he may have been the last thing that I was sure of.

I'm not sure.

Now I often think of poetry
and pick my nails instead,
'cuz I'm afraid it won't live up to the visions in my head.
It all seems so weightless,
when we're floating,
but then,
you can't sleep forever.
You have to descend.
And when I woke up, what I realized was-
everything seemed so real.
Now it's me and my dust.
Everything seems so real-
everything that I love.
But all his dreams seemed so real,
'til his dreams all dried up.
So what
does that mean
for me
and my stuff?

It was all so real.
I could swing so high up.