Dust

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 he
never got to walk the halls of again