My childhood was spent
trudging the endless way to school,
sweating in summer classrooms
that chilled my winter bones.
Our hostile environment surely existed
only to keep us awake all year.

Nothing was ever comfortable,
My body stretched, twisted, inflated
in all the wrong ways, and my legs were too stubby, then suddenly too damn spidery
long.
I had hair everywhere I didn't care for
and none where it was welcome.

I was a careful kid, and the world was
a bungee jump on fire. I always seemed to misplace
the cord or the extinguisher.

I never really understood
the rules of this illogical game
I played every day.

There was only a single safe place I could retreat to.
You may have heard of it.
They played the sweetest synth piano there.
They had these crazy adventures
that never truly ended.
The skies were clear
and the road ahead
was straight and
filled with wonder.
I met the coolest brothers there,
one in red, one in green.
They were always super nice,
even though I visited
far too often.
Those were the days
In good old World 1-1.

The game kept on,
always changing.
From plumbers and shrooms
through sky blue hedgehogs,
kings of iron fists, fantasies
somehow never final, then
flat out down the narrow stretch,
jumping for dear life into the black,
reaching into free space with commanding wings,
facing my demons with big fucking guns,
planning risky invasions of Russia,
retreating from dinosaur hordes, growing
ever more proficient in kung fu, karate, street fighting,
fitting every block into every improbable location,
firing light guns into the perfect dark,
rolling up the world and appealing to the cosmos,
ruling the arenas, the fetid sewers, the barricades and the sixteen decks,
searching for the weak spot and blowing up the core,
blinking at the blinding drifts at Phendrana,
taking back every last one of our bases,
outplaying all the cocky rock stars,
going to each and every mad world,
red, blue, pink-speckled, parallax dawns,
the seven modes of the revolving galaxies,
blast processing the entire experience
along the way.

I admit it.

I ate every mushroom.
I drank every potion.
I stole every gil.
And I took every power-up
known to man.
The multiverse
sprang open
and I was
a laughing psychonaut.

But I would do it all again in a heartbeat.
It is such a small price to pay
for living a thousand extra lives
besides your own.

I guess I never really grew up,
I only increased in bits.
But I finally get the logic.
And when the screen grows dark
I still have one life left to live.