There's no better way to end "Brother's Night Out"
than racing melting McDonald's ice cream cones
under the sanctity of star-saturated muggy Texas skies,
letting the bonding moment justify rebellion
against the ordained 10:30 bedtime.

His face turns sugar-sticky as he attempts to lick the falling cream
and tell me, all at once, what Nintendo tricks he has learned
during my college Sabbath.
I, in trying to recall how I once thirsted for the mysteries
of hidden levels and game-pad combo's,
return once again to the intrigue
of the new chocolate-swirl flavor in my hand.
The emperor of ice cream could never prophecy so well as I
that exactly half way down the cone, the kid will announce
that he's full, at last, and ask to run off to reenact
the heroic rituals of the evening movie.

The view into the window distracts communion.
There are two of them, talking to the black man in shorts and a white tank top -
a man and a lady, in their Sunday best.
A business deal?
They're exchanging papers over coffee.
No, I like to imagine that they're J-dub's
persuading about faith and things.
The irony of it -
them, inside the chapel, oblivious to the deity behind it.
This is the one true peace, here, worshipping the fast-food gods,
quietly surrounded by night air and screaming kids,
wishing upon Sagittarius for love and wealth and those normal things,

I am investigating the McDonald's playground,
gone Protestant at some indiscernible moment
between mine and my brother's youth.
Oh, these twelve years. Blasphemous revelations
have decreed a new sacrament -
excommunicating the sacrilege of pebble-sanded grounds
and metal slides that burn and freeze like hell in weather.
No longer will wooden fortresses hold condemning jungle gyms
while youth dares to cross the sinful abyss.

The red pride of courage was the reward, then.
In this enlightened age, such journeys are risky temptations for youth;
so my brother partakes of brilliantly colored plastic -
red, yellow, green, blue.
Inside, there is rumored to lie a paradise of gadgets -
wheels, mechanical arms, rotating satellite dishes ...
Experience blinds us from the full scope
of swiftly unstable paradise.

Forget the gods of Adam's playscapes;
he will not recognize a difference.
Heaven is the bonding innocence of McDonald playgrounds
and 39-cent swirl cones -
twelve years has taught that
salvation needs be an insured certainty.