Long gone are the days when a dollar was worth a dollar and a smile was worth so much more. Gone are the days when exchanges of all sorts were simple handshakes and helping hands. Gone are the blacksmiths and bookkeepers, the bank tellers and time keepers. The teenage today is troublesome electronic. Gone are the dusty baseball mitts nestled in garage crates and captive deflating basketballs, gone is that burning youthful desire for dirt roads and back pedal skid stops, pausing to playfully throw rocks at the upstairs windows, with grubby hands holding flashlights behind saggy woodshed walls. The kids are gone and the cans they kicked. The church pews hidden under holding pepsi cans from spilling into berber carpeting, gone musty corridors and steep narrow circular staircases, up towards the white steeple. Gone are the main-street markets and local mechanics with stained fingernails. The neon budweiser blinking in noon, the naked swimming and childish baths with the neighbors. Gone is the naivety, the nonsense, the never mind the world lets wander in the woods until dark comes dank and cold and creeping across the swamp. Some rusted chevy's round headlight chambers swimming in spiderwebs and half sunken, spills treasures from her bed. Gone are the children and their lost childhood. Their sparkling north center swim rafts and slightly rotted deck sections, their slivery moons in backyard campgrounds. Gone with the trees and with the town center dug up and destroyed, some disrespectful notion that new is better and better is moving forward. Gone are the wild grasses of midwest, the wild flowers that'd flourish the foundations for life, the wild life-lust of youth, that yearning for pure adventure. The sunburned youthful forearms and sun bleached hair. The strained dinner calls and quietly washing mud caked bare feet, then falling in dewy grass at the days every end. The cold evening calm and the unexpected knock. Gone chipped paint on the porch rail sinking and slumping into the front yard. Gone is the future of that memory. Made in youthful sleeping bags now tucked musty in the basement, the broken hideout floorboards stubbed toes and splinters, eager eyes between the spindles of some christmas morning. Gone is the wood-stove and the winter and the wishful imagination, the vivid images, the playful pirates stooped in a closet's end under satin stalactites. The endless scenes and gone lost are all of them. The american world is within a world within the world wide web. Why don't we look outside?
