Sweet Sixteen

At Sixteen, I bought a typewriter.

The thing, encased in a sixties style vermillion box.

I bought it to write, purchased with the last 75 dollars of a paper food service check.

The thing, a polypropylene casket.

Manufactured, it seemed, to match the cautionary walls painted by my life. 

At home, I opened the thing, and left it in the corner for a time in the near future.

What happened, I can't remember now,

The fighting upstairs moving downstairs, the shouts, the redolent of rum and cigarettes.

Thick in the air.

The next morning, there was a hole in the white wall, and a black eye on her face.

These events came and went in a harsh and unpredictable cadence.

But the typewriter always stayed there.

One day I finally wrote, my emotions pouring into the thick inked letters like a tar from my lungs.

Residual rage time stamped in the ephemeral beauty of rhyming words.

Of a parable, myself leaving.

Of the words I wrote sweeping me.

Away