two or three

As children we believed in things like magic, like trolls hidden beneath rocks, like doorways to otherworlds in tree stumps and brick walls.  Spider webs clotted with dew were faerie jewels, toadstools benches for drunken leprechauns.  We wore dirt like badges and scabs like medals, bruises like battle wounds and missing teeth like trophies.

And because we watched the flags burn on the hillsides, because we saw fortresses fall and walls petrify like old wood, because we held together childhood secrets and touched the undersides of the stars, because we pleaded for the speechless and stood naked on the towering barrows, because we turned one hundred and twenty-seven degrees into the sun and spat on his green weather face and listened to the heavy rains hit the fen and because we let smog stain the city sky and let the old ways leak like shit into the sewers,
because we swapped out magic for science and cloaks for white coats and wands for cigarettes and tea parties for shots,
we grew old.