SUGAR

(Improvisation in the Key of C)

by Johnny Cate

All I need is a miracle
All I need is you
—Mike + The Mechanics, All I Need Is a Miracle

Picture this: for a nickel
 you get
a two-foot tube of pure sugar
that hits your prepubescent
nucleus accumbens
in under 60 seconds.

The effect is biological chaos
that could be measured
on a Richter scale—
a sapphiric Bic lighter lit
by a neural gas leak.

That day at the pool
my brother Chris
tossed ice on a topless sunbather’s
back
we were so jacked up
on Pixie Sticks
seeing her tits
was beside the point.
What mattered
was the act—if you'd asked us why
we couldn’t
have told you.

All we knew was that
that candy'd kick in
 like a wave giving way
 to shore, like
verse giving way
to chorus—a mental
 eruption into major key.

We became velocity
embodied, hellions the lot
but also
the vision
and proof of God's youthfulness
lacing creation
and through creation we'd thrash,
we'd thrash,
we'd thrash,

ascendant toward our
metabolic crescendo:

the crash. Sudden comedown
that left us
carried to the car
in our mothers' arms.

Johnny Cate is a poet, copywriter, and vintage T-shirt collector from Asheville, NC.