TEDDY BEARS IN THE AIR

Teddy Bears in the Air
Age 5, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, 1949
-- This is one poem, in an autobiographical series of poems, that I posted here at WriteSpike. Go to my stories section for others. They are in chronological order. --

Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will...
with the analytical [adult] mind that enables it
to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.
~ Charles Baudelaire ~

When
adults asked me
I told them about an airplane
that was always in the air
and never came down
it was a hospital plane
with Teddy Bear doctors and Panda nurses;
people who needed to leave the Earth
could be lifted up
and given comfort

When
my grandfather's nurse
took me for a walk
I told her I wanted to marry her
and live together in one of
those small stone towers
that was part of the wall
of granddad's gated community

When
the hot dog man
who had a cart
on the pathway back to our house
took a disliking,
he yelled he was going to cook me
like a wiener and eat me for dinner -
so I ran home
scared I'd be caught
like Hansel and Gretel

When
at Christmas I went to see Santa,
he jumped out of a plane
and parachuted down
to the shopping center -
only he got tangled in
telephone wires
and I had to go before
they cut him down

Then
when I was 13
I saw a photograph
in an old Life Magazine
of that same Santa dangling in the air,
as firemen on long ladders
worked to get him
back on the ground