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I don't particularly like how this started, but I kind of like what it became. True story, actually. I could conceivably turn this into a story-telling bit, I think. For now, a poem.
The hill was torn down.
As much as a hill can be torn down.
They carted it off by truckloads
Mounds of crumbling brown like chocolate cake
Speeding off down the road
To wherever dirt goes to die.
Dirt depots.
Grime garages.
I didn’t see it, though.
I just came back one day
Walked through outstretched branches
Empty bottles and used condoms,
Past the broken brick of the old school,
Through the criss-crossed dead trees.
And there it was.
Or, wasn’t.
The field was empty, still littered with brown
Like the world’s most popular dog park,
The sky too empty above me.
The first time I saw it,
I hated it.
A pile of dirt obscuring the green grass.
It was pollutant,
Thick brown pox sickening the sky
The choking smell of earth.
I climbed it,
Because that’s what you do as a kid.
Whatever you don’t like you stand on.
Show it who’s boss.
And the view changed things.
I saw the world unfold at my feet,
Watched the cars I couldn’t drive,
The kids that teased me,
The adults that knocked me aside.
All of it shrunken toys beneath me and my mound.
And I thought
Hey, this could be fun.
The hill became my bunker,
My Everest,
My summer-time sled.
It was an evil lair
And a monument to heroes.
Once I dug into the heart of it
Made myself a cave
A new home, all my own
No mortgages or taxes
This was my dirt empire,
Every grain moved the way I wanted.
I would watch the world tumble down around me
Protected by my shield of Earth,
I would remake the world
Put myself on every hill,
Raise my arms to the sky and lightning crackles, dramatic music.
Lucky for the world,
The cave collapsed the next day.
I wondered if I’d ever be King.
Then there was the rain
The time I got my leg stuck.
The more I pulled, the more I sank.
The hill would not let me go.
And I thought
What a way to die.
“Local boy eaten by dirt hill”
“Proof found that kids are really stupid”
I started crying.
Asked the hill…why?
After all we’d been through.
It let me go then,
In a ball of mud and pathetic,
I hit the ground.
I looked up and thought
Even the conquered stand up sometimes.
The field has leveled out since.
They cleared away the old building,
Cut down the wild trees,
Placed slices of memory on trucks
And were gone in a puff of diesel.
I sat down where my cave used to be
Let the dirt trickle through my fingers.
And remembered how big the world used to be.
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