I AM 17. I HAVE A LOT TO SAY.

My mother was around

all the time back then, always walking

in and out of rooms carrying stacks

of  laptop computers. She spent most

of  her daylight hours blowing dust

out of circuits, fans, motherboards, daughterboards.

Sometimes her little canister would die

and she’d have to use her mouth.

My father was gone all day

every day getting repetitive stress injuries

at the newspaper. He was a journalist

and everyone hated him, even his friends.

Nothing really happened during my entire childhood

so he ended up spending most days

shooting paper footballs through a miniature goal post

he kept in the locked drawer of  his desk.

He was rarely kind. And in the few, short

instances he was, it still didn’t seem like it.

Something about his mouth made everything he did

seem either sinister or inept.

He was completely inscrutable except for a period

in the spring of 2004, when he was just sad.

I was young that year and my sister was older.

She came home from college for the whole summer of 2005.

I was 14. She told me not to worry

about other people, not to worry about war, not to worry

about a thing. That was the greatest summer

of my short life. I had no friends. Oh I had people

I talked to at school but once summer hit

it was like every school bus had crashed

headfirst into a wall except the one that was carrying

me and my silver trumpet.

I had that tall kind of  joy that you can only feel

when your bones still have another few inches left in them.

My sister and I would watch three movies a day

and never go to the lake. Everybody says it seems

like summer never ends

until it does. But that’s a lie. I knew

so little back then but the one thing I did know

was that all my friends were coming back

and I would once more join them

in the hallways, in the classrooms,

once more join them for hours after school

in the far part of  the parking lot

and would continue to do so until I turned 16

and got a job cutting my fingers

on the cheese grater at the Pizza Factory.

After that everything was all work work

work go home Jeremy get your feet off the sofa  Jeremy

work work math homework band-aids

and on a good day a little trumpet

and on the best days

all trumpet. I wanted

my life to be about music

but in the end it was about

getting B’s in subjects such as Spanish.

I don’t know, sometimes it feels like those summers

really did never end, they went on forever

and just got

progressively

worse. We like to pretend that one day we just

walk into our adulthood like a congressman

walking into the ocean,

but we all know that’s not true. What really happens

is we walk into the same building

day after day, but every night

some crew comes in and replaces something little—

a lamp housing, the chair of a conference table—

until nothing is the same, until the building is not as we

remembered it at all, until the building is stronger,

up to code but a lot less fun,

and the lighting, the lighting is fluorescent and obscene.