My son and two hundred other children sing
an hour of songs
with piano and horns, a recorder
played by a pretty music teacher with a French
name.
Reminds me of playing trombone
in the city school band,
in the old auditorium
(torn down last winter), Spring outside the doors,
light through the cracks on deteriorating walls,
sweaty palms and music taking over
the building.
An hour before I sat
at the old Gaston theatre (now a furniture
store) watching H. Gordon Lewis'
two thousand maniacs by myself
in the back while North Belmont hoodlums come in
for the blood feast
sat hooting down close
where they could see the blood better,
women and men chopped up and abused like they wanted
to do to their parents and their uncles and the guys they sat
next to. How I came from there to that horn
I do not recall, but in between were the streets of the
town, the smells of the swelling glandular eruptions of Spring,
the poet's painting eye aroused, the sweet blue air, the
rushing blood within me all the way home, all the way up to
the band stand back from the darkened seats then the
other faces.
When the band laid into
Lassue trombone,
I thought of the boys in the front row an hour and three
blocks away, coming gore drunk from the theater
to pour through the auditorium screaming, swinging machetes.
They probably have children here tonight,
these children who
radiate innocense
in spite of freedy, jason, the starving television children.
A blood hungry terror stalks them
the way a tiger stalks a prancing antelope
or the man a deer,
but it does not lighten their step as they dance
vocal cords.

- David Childers