The split comes at eighteen
When the coach
With eight white horses
Turns into a pumpkin
And rats start eating what’s inside.

The last day you are seventeen,
You belong to the
pampered and privileged.
The next day,
The law that protected
Expires,
Buried as soon as
The candles blow out
On the birthday cake.
After that, jail
Or the poorhouse
Awaits
While homelessness
Like a devil
Lurks in the shadows.

“What would you do if
We jumped you?”
I heard this every year
In the classrooms where I taught.

“I was a Marine, kid.
They didn’t train me to fight.
They taught me to kill.”

In thirty years of teaching,
No one jumped.

When I was born,
Kids were to be seen
And not heard.
That didn’t stop me.
I was a chatterbox
But respectful and shy.
Today kids are
The center of the world
Protected by laws
Pampered by the
Moguls of media.
Allowing them
To commit murder and
Get away with it
As long as they support
Fruit-loops;
Fast food;
Disneyland;
The latest styles,
And the Magic Mountains
Of the world.

Kids will be kids
Is bullshit!
Kids are clay,
What Parents or guardians
Carve them to be.

Last year an adolescent
Approached me in the
Parking lot of a motel
In Southern California.
“Hey, old man,
can you give me
and my girlfriend a lift
to the next motel.
This rotten place
won’t rent us a room.”

This skinny, underage runt
Wore off-color shorts
That did not fit.
His plastic frame glasses
Were held together by tape.

I never called
Anyone an old man
To his face.

Last night,
An even younger
Brat called me an old man
As he and his
Underage gang
Raced bikes up and down
The steep driveway to my house in the dark.
“Hey, old man,
you can’t take our pictures now.
It’s too dark.
You can’t stop us.”

This scene has played
Itself out in reruns
For two summers.

I stopped being nice
and called the police.

Once a Marine always a Marine.
We just get older,
but the killer
lurks under lock and key.
______________________________
Discover My Splendid Concubine by Lloyd Lofthouse at AuthordDen. (Click here) to arrive at that AuthorsDen page.

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