boyhood then is broken toys and nobody really knows
the avalanche of notes I kept sorted, annotated:
we told one another we were aliens in order to maintain
a safe distance while we touched, our bicycles making
dumb love beneath the underbrush and afterwards we
kept our tongues tamped down, zebras in a zoo, we were
soldiers with secret handshakes, you carried baby around
on your back, a dutiful baboon, a modern family, I thought
I had it down or figured out, children are sincere until
adulthood, I thought I loved you until you closed your eyes
at the top of the water slide, you said: “I am not like you.” 

a kind of comfort, then, my bike rusting in the rain,
a mirror of shame, all the truth of tutti-fruit.
in the middle of the night, I threw all the superheroes
out, practicing for another quiet burial, years later.
the limitations of our own restless expectations.  

love leaves like that, sometimes in a huff, and I’m
dousing all the scrapes with lemon juice, I’m scrubbing
the salt into my wounds like a certain loon, and soon
I waited for your replacement, the chaste wife, so sure
of all the riches waiting in that black-hole afterlife.
do we replace people like clean underwear, naked
under there, restocking the meat counter with fresh
cases of protein, he waited with the car running, clever
thief, voice as low as rumbled thunder, skin as warm as
melted butter, stealing the steaks from me, just as the
man who was not my father stole them from the grocery.
I was orange blossom water, now, then, the closest I
would come to having a daughter, one moment only
a boy, the next a recipe there is no way to follow.

Jason Davidson spent several years helping adults remember how to play make-believe again through the writing and production of over 200 works of surrealist, experiential and interactive theatre. He has sometimes been an educator, a coach and a cook. He has always been a poet. He lives on California’s Central Coast with his husband and small brood of four-legged children. He is currently working on finding a home for a full-length poetry manuscript and completing a novel. Jason can be reached at jasonwriteswords@gmail.com.