At the Fountain With the Turtles in It

They’re swimming up spitting water at me
With a profundity never found in the hapless
Circumstance of being a boisterous mind in a fragile shell.
They do not know, care, that the television set flickered
Spry visages of their mutated kin all through my formative years
While my brain was shaped, getting swollen with pain, knowledge of the facts
Like on Sunday night you’re really sad because Monday is next
And you’ll soon be in the brown bricked school and your socks will be wet.

To the turtles swimmin’, spittin’;
Thanks for forgiving even if my brother hasn’t
For my forgetting at age ten to latch the makeshift pen
When he found one of you mashed by a speeding car,
He built it in the corner of the unkempt back yard
Where grasshoppers spat tobacco from down so low.

And maybe I don’t want to see them (turtles) again
Because you got the girl you loved one at the ramshackle carnival
After inching to clasp her hand in the spinning spaceship
And stopping time because you thought that there you two couldn’t die
But I won't make you cheap like that

Even though now they say I look like you
With my hair falling out and my skin hanging off
I won’t make you cheap like that, little turtles
Because you know not what you do you just do
And leave us hanging (spitting) like the dogs we should play with instead

Keep swimming, spitting.