Nostalgia

the compact disc was the wave of the future,
i had my first kiss and i liked it ok.
april and i slow-danced to the cocktail soundtrack
and kokomo is still my favourite song to this day
remember when john stamos played the drums in the beach boys?
that’s the kind of thing that happened back then: musicians guested on sitcoms
and actors made albums.
the late eighties was a fantastic time to be ten.
and one night i was watching the lost boys with a girl who i liked and her
friends
and when the vampires attacked the hippies on the beach
she said she had a crush on kiefer sutherland.
and so for a while i wanted to be a vampire —
a vampire like kiefer, not like the guy who played max.
but my favourite scene was tim cappello at the boardwalk when he played that
shirtless solo on his golden sax.
in retrospect it all seems spectacular.
and i’d love to go back but i broke my flux capacitor. and i tell ya,
it’s just nostalgia. it’s as vague as a disease like fibromyalgia.
but instead of unexplained pain, it’s unexplained pleasure, buried deep in your
brain, like pirate treasure.
i know there’s lots that i’m forgetting.
but i choose to remember the music and the heavy petting.
i think there was some heartbreak and some humiliation, which i guess is a part
of a well-rounded education
god knows it wasn’t all rainbows and puppy dogs back then, around the time the
eighties waited for the nineties to begin.
but what good is an imagination if you can’t pretend? because after all it’ll
never be that good again.