I used to live in Portland, Oregon, and I played a lot of video games. There was a chain of video game parlors called Wunderland, where you paid a cover of (at the time) a dollar ninety-five and then the game machines took nickels. My favorite branch of Wunderland was on Belmont, in an old movie theater called Avalon. It was awesome, and I wrote a poem about it.
What the
pikeman pondered hard
While storming
Chateau Galliard
Through
death and
glory, pounding
blood
Through the horror of the rising flood
Of bodies now before his feet
Will I live or
Charon meet
Echoes through
history on and on
To adrenaline-soaked
Avalon.
For what bully would not run
From one who's bested
Shang-Ti Sun
In
Mortal Kombats One and Two
And through whose
laser-cannon's view
Has won some little
freedom back,
Be he teenage
Nazi,
Jew, or
black,
Wrested from him, sorely missed,
By another boy with larger fists
For breaking
Mother's
wedding tray,
Crying, or being in the way?
Escape from home to stay alive
And spend his dollar ninety-five
And feed
machine and
fantasy
On nickels of
impotency
To heal the ache of heart and skin
In the rank,
electronic din
With frustration walking hand in hand
To
Avalon, his
Wunderland