with the cheese grater platform
and rusting willow bent arms.
They replaced it with a rubberized purple thing
shaped like a cross and mounted on springs.
It doesn't turn about. It is no safer.
I cranked it clockwise till my sneakers slipped
in the flat and sharp and splintered wood chips
and let it go. It cracked the neck clear off my empty beer bottle
in a shower of green bits and noise you would have yelled at me for.
I sit on the purple idiot proof machine and
the spins close in regardless. I'm lying on the ground
and I can barely see, in my fish eye, the tips of the trees
edging the soccer fields where you used to get lost while I spun myself senseless.
The clouds are gentle as they rotate about my field of view and my cheek prickles
in the breeze and I remember the feel of your fur
when I carried you home after long romps in the park
in your breathless, enthusiastic, and twilight years.
