arcade token

let me borrow your teeth.
i need a neon way out of all
this gender. we used to go when
we had nothing else to say to each other.
there was a mirror to laser gun
until the tokens were huge & trophy.
on the television were videos
of our fathers punching each other
until it was just a football place
& not the european kind. i loved
that fake money. to gather it in my hands
without all the digital that has been
stealing our scarce whimsy. 
shooting dinosaurs. shooting a plane.
shooting in a hallway of dice.
there were kids too. their hands like birds.
we seldom played together, instead,
came there to chop up ourselves
into bigger pieces. a teleportation machine
gave us brief glimpses of a volcano place.
i wore makeup back then & my face
melted as the night went on. we ate candy 
in the parking lot behind the mall
waiting for an engine to take us.
all those lights like canaries
in my eyelashes. i never really won anything.
sometimes a plastic holy statue 
or banana taffy. i think we could all use some help
unraveling. a shrine to give in the glow &
the tunnel. i remember most the quiet
of the street outside. the purple & green 
shadows cast from our skeletons. 
i think you still loved me
or else we were making it work 
which is what everyone says when
the arcade keeps their fingernails.
a mouth is sometimes a window
but most often a purse full of tokens. 
did you hold my hand? did we win somewthing?