hello rover

When I was a kid I grew up in a house on a hill, not the top, not the bottom but the middle.

And I still remember where I cracked my head, in the vacant lot, there's a row of tiny houses there now.

And we used to light fires in the gutters, and I could cool my head on the concrete steps.

But the girl down the street hit my sister on the head with a stick and we hid behind my father as he knocked on her parents’ door, to tell them what she did, but the parents were drunk so they really didn't give a shit.

And the girl down the street said her dog couldn't bark, because a man with an axe cut its voice box out.

But my older sister told me that it probably wasn't true, and I believed what she said because she took me by the hand one time, when a couple of men drove down the hill in a white van said there was a phone box filled with money 'round the corner, and I would've gone along, but she took me by the hand to the house in the middle of the hill.

And our Mother knew the words to a lot of different songs, and we'd always sing the harmonies when we'd sing along.

She had cool cool hands when the fever hit, and then the noises that the trains made sounded like people in my head.

And the stories that the ceiling told, through the pictures in the grains on the pinewood boards.

And I could stay outside till the sky went red, and I could cool my head on the concrete steps.

And you can never really see the top from the bottom.

I don't pay enough attention to the good things when I've got them.

# posted by marvin @ 11:52 AM