You Can't have it All

But you can have warm chocolate milk every morning,
always being the sweet childhood pleasure.
You can have the small dirty black feet next to your nose,
waking you and not caring enough to push them back because you love her.
You can have the shouts and laughter, the imaginary ship,
that sails to the living room.
You can have the imperfect perfect family picture
that takes hours to take because the dog ate my popsicle and cousin had to sneeze.
You can have laughter, because when you laugh it’s like the sun flower that turns to the light. You can have the smell of fresh clean laundry right down to the socks. You can have breakfast outside at 1:30 in the afternoon.
You can play with the hose in a summer day
because you don’t have a pool.
You can have the daily call of your grandfather
to get his blessing through a camera.
You can’t go to the other side of it and give him a good night kiss in his forehead because you’re too far from home. But you can have the sound of his voice clearly as if he were next to you. And you can be grateful for photo albums;
for if we didn’t, we would forget the good moments.
You can have the noisy stairs, when one descends,
you can figure out who is walking down.
You can have your fathers arm around you. Shoulders watching a cooking show and not hearing a single complains when you know he wants to watch soccer.
You can have the pictures of your sister on your bedroom wall,
you can have fire place and burnt marshmallow.
You can’t count of someone to push you to it all the time
but there is always that one on the stand cheering
as you do a flip turn, as you push off the wall and take a deep breath and stroke.
You can have a mango tree on your yard and pick the juiciest one of them all
and you can have hands dripping with mango juice
and your mom warning you to not stain your clothes.
You can have a friend who knows your melody and can hum it back to you
when you have forgotten.
You can have dirty hands piled up in the center of a chant circle
and a cry of excitement before a soccer game. And you can have that long lost picture
stuffed in a box and the back side written on with your cousins lousy handwriting
letting you know that they love you.
You can’t have your neighbor’s pretty garden filled with flowers and fleshly cut grass, but when you turn around you know you can have your own beautiful, uncut, grassy garden that might not be like the others filled with happiness, love, and the cherishment for the things you can have.