Innocence

When I look around, I see nothing reflecting my face
and I know that I haven't influenced this place
and there is nothing of me filling up this space
and I just wanna go back home,
where the dirt on the street has fallen off my feet
and the brown on the ground is the sweat off my brow -
where the baseball diamond is a jungle,
and the jungle gym is a made-up war,
and the war-zone is all around me,
but bullets look like baseballs
and grafitti is nothing if not public fingerpaint.
Ignorance is bliss, maybe,
but it's nothing compared with innocence.
That's bliss married to unresponsibility
and it was given to me naturally and unconditionally
and nothing was expected save the childish ability
to entertain my own damn self.
My hood was an apartment complex in North Long Beach -
a quarter-block as far as the imagination could reach
and the barbed wire was higher than truth could teach,
and so I played with guns
and basketballs and girls,
and was never aware of the ugliness of the world.
Violence existed somewhere beyond the railroad,
somewhere even my folks didn't go,
and it certainly never had anything to do with me.
And I just wanna go back home.
In a world I built - a backyard made guilt-free
innocent - more innocent than adults would dare believe,
even though my innocence was their baby.