Let's spend the weekend in a lullaby.
Take a trip right to the edge of what you know,
and let’s sit in a perfect silence, 2 as 1, young and old.
I can smell dinner from the other room, but where we’re going,
it once smelled like the safety of a sleeping house, the glossy first sight of moonlit dew.
Good and evil. Play the Dark Story, but stay until the end.
It’s never over right when you think:
think of sunsets and sunrises and
flashbulb summer evenings on a breathless kitchen floor.
I’m giving you the complete tour of the place;
this is where I go to dream, ducking under the static.
The furniture is right where I left it,
all alone in a big empty home.
I’m scared to look around in these games, afraid of what’s lurking out of sight.
In between lightning strikes, I watched another once play Super Metroid.
I saw him find the Ice Beam in the boiling hot waters of a hurricane.
And in 2004 when Ivan came to town I tried so hard to beat Bowser in the Dark World –
the power shuts off and I’m alone in the CRT, inky black swirls.
We ebb and flow and bounce back and forth in genealogical poetry.
Completely out of control, and when the screen zaps off, you’re left with a burn-in.
When the credits roll and the trailer plays for the Last Story,
you’ve never seen anything like it.
And then when it’s over, for real this time,
you see the borders of the TV.
That’s you on the loading screen.
You won’t know it yet, but these are formative memories.
I see myself on the loading screen.
These are formative memories.