Our Modern Utopia

I wander with my daughter.
Soft sands of dust and warm water like crystal glass
Glitter underfoot.
Boys build their castles and laugh,
They destroy each others forts,
The imaginary sand soldiers,
Flying in sandy bits everywhere.
Buried carelessly in dirty grit.

I smile as she gapes above.
Fungus shaped clouds cast shadows,
On the boys and their sandcastles.

My brother gives my son his gift,
Lovingly wrapped with paper that my eye hungers,
He rips it off, his age look only deeper, we laugh.

A plastic gun,
Beeps and fizzles, flashes and sparkles.
Many hours we spent,
He would shoot me, I would fall and die,
Moaning loudly, to hear him laugh.
My neighbour washes his car and turns his head,
Such things don’t happen.
He is a general.

We could barely afford it.
All those years ago,
We gave ourselves,

Dreams and cash included,
To have a child.
Two eventually.

My wife, she teaches.
Kathy, that little girl,
“She’ll be great”
Says my wife, wisely.
“She is the smartest
She allows none to copy her,
I punished John for trying to.”
“How is he?”
“They’re taking him out,”
She finished,
“Somewhere that suits his special needs.”

They came through the wall,
She told me.          
“We were doing art”

Those red colours were dulled by ashen dust.
These knights that held them hostage
“I was so frightened.”

She claims.
I cry, me, who calls myself a man.
She hugged all of them,
Squeezed and shoved into her embrace in a corner of hell.
Between the gathered students
And the man who fights for his family,
Threatening them all with gun in hand.

My daughter, she caught our modern plague.
I ran away to London and back,
Pink ribbon in hand.

Was she cured,
Or only worsened by these wonder drugs?
In the end she died of M.R.S.A.

My wife turned to Heaven and Hell.
My son, depression is a noose.
I can only sit back and think,
Look how great we have become.