Summer was haunted by rain. That was before we gave up, 
shut down the house, dug deep into the tunnels of despair. 
We named them that for a joke, 
but really they led all over the neighborhood, 
down past the tennis courts, the softball field, the basketball hoop.
If we waited til the moon set, we could make it all the way 
to the corner shop for pretzels and chocolate bars.
Sometimes we slept down there on beds we blew up 
like great, fat balloons. Sometimes we watched movies 
about the end of the world. You could always tell who was going to die 
by the music and how much you disliked them. 
But sometimes the music lied, like when it bounced along 
like a country dance. Once the hero died in the first act, 
but he came back as ectoplasm or someone’s memory, 
it was never very clear. In that one, the aliens came just in time 
to save the precocious child and her pretty mom. 
The hero turned into stardust or cosmic rays or something 
involving a lot of glowy light. It was a cartoon, so it wasn’t very long, 
but we watched it every night for a week, as it unlocked all its secrets. 
Above, the house trembled when the giant lizard crashed down Times Square. 
It turned out to be allergic to sulfa drugs, which was a strange way 
to end an existential threat. By the time the popcorn was all gone, 
the beast was lying dead near the 59th Street Bridge.
The precocious kid sucked on a lollypop, figuring the odds of their survival at 58%.