I dream suburbias where every child is brave and funny, where a green-skinned scientist cackling at dusk or a journey to the sherbet-wastes of Mars are childhoo

I dream suburbias where every child is brave and funny, where a green-skinned scientist cackling at dusk or a journey to the sherbet-wastes of Mars are childhood commonplaces. I dream teenagers, the boys with letter sweatshirts, girls with single brush-stroke brows, in endless ice-cream parlors, never growing old or running out of flavors, dream them in moon-chilled jalopies when their sit-com day is through... the delicate perfume of sex and leatherette pervades the air, the radios playing new Gene Vincent songs, new episodes of discontinued but beloved shows. I dream of cities that old futurists would weep with joy to see, of wharfside neighborhoods where tough kids track down spies, where crumbling tenements contort to teetering and eccentric shapes that seem to spell out words against the night. I dream of rugged, mustard-yellow monsters from the deep, with vulgar and percussive names like Zax and Rul-Rah-Room. I dream a world of dreams fulfilled, a place where ecstasy and not his brother pain has run amok, and even as I dream I know my dreams are almost true, a planet of attained desire and concrete fantasy that spins and glitters, balanced on the diamond capstone of Olympus.