on watching a herd of children run in a mall promenade

Oppositely charged neutrons unleashed at odd intervals; the red-headed one with the berserk chocolate stains dribbled down her shirt front is static electric and sticks to the floor. She is up for steps, but only a few, then down and crawling and squealing and gibbering in that way that babies do. All of them run in dizzy tiny circles and orbit each other cautiously, their eyeballs rollin in those big big heads of theirs, hair and tongues and four queer teeth pokin out funny behind those smilin lips. All the parents sit stupified and distant and look at their nails and check their watches and the one in the black yaks on her cell-phone like a religion, dominus vobiscum and those goofy little footsteps, double-knotted and sizes too big or too small pound switchfoot rhythms all over the floor, morse code gospel et cum spiritu tuo. These ersatz little people and their wild flinging hair, and their shakey little legs and their wild inspiration, gleaning all that stellar cosmic sunlight like smiles from Nirvana, all of em pinging off each other and running around and looking at mother and father. All of them wide-eyed and slobbery and jellied in the knees, screaming out loud gee-ooh-shee-da-da-da-da et al, all this gibberish nonsense that means nothing to anybody except for maybe them, cause every incoherent little syllable makes one or the other smile big, point a silly little finger this way or that. Sometimes up at the silvery light of midday coming through the big round atrium, crooked little tiny fingers and perfect round little pinkpale nails, terribly small. I am scared at how small, all of them, tiny people with big old lives and this one is a carpenter in training pants, this one is a soldier and this one, this one in the corner is the poet and he says his ga-ga-ga incessently, and suddenly Mother decides she needs to have a browse about the shoe store, and Father needs a new pair of slacks, and one by one they get picked up and toted off, little tiny spheres of influence, all assimilated and bye-bye, waving to each other in their goopy language with their salivacious faces wrought in tiny little smiles, ephemereal little whispers of something, bye bye.