Borderline

The Two Boys From Neverland

You named your home after mine
like you thought that would help you get here,
but you could have come any time you wanted.
We know you here.
We put your face on a postage stamp
and spin “P.Y.T.” at all our dance parties.
Us lost boys know our own.

Maybe our stories are a little different.
I tried to stitch my shadow to the soles of my feet
to keep from losing it
and you spent fifty years trying to sever the threads
that tied you to yours,
but we met the same end, didn’t we?
The ones here who fell out of baby carriages
or got separated from their mothers at shopping malls
will never understand this.
They never grow up
because they each have someone, somewhere
to keep them suspended in milk-carton portraits
like insects preserved in amber
but you and I, Michael, we never grow up
because we were never children to begin with.

We crash-landed in adulthood with eyes sharp as pirates’ swords
from the battles they’d seen
and we used them to carve holes in the world
we could crawl inside and be boys forever.
It was easy for you not to grow up.
Your public didn’t want you to anyway.
They were so attached to the photographs
of the smiling little boy with the Afro
they might as well have plastered them on the backs of milk cartons
when time stretched your limbs and vocal cords
and stretched something inside you so taut it snapped.

Did you carry that broken boy on your back all those years?
Did he whisper your lyrics into your ear
so you still had the voice of an angel
even with all those demons at your heels?
When they called you a monster
did you write “Thriller” as your battle cry?
When they called you a train wreck
did you tell them that the crush of metal twisted the rubble
into shapes so beautiful they could only be called sculpture?
And when they tried to tell you
St. Peter would never let you through his gates
did you say,
“That’s okay -
me and the other Peter,
we got some plans of our own?”

Fuck Valhalla.
Fuck a send-off on a flaming ship.
There’s a pirate ship with your name on it
and we need your help dueling on the gangplanks,
so hop a turnstile onto the deck -
that “second star to the right and straight on till morning” stuff
is for the ones who aren’t bad enough
to hit the ground running.
This is your homecoming.
By the time you step foot on our soil,
you will be baptized in saltwater and I promise you, boy
for one moment at least
you will feel the least lost
you ever did in your life.