Where Did the Magic Go? (Slam Poem)
We woke up and it was gone
It used to be so colorful, not white and black
I remember the smell of a
Toys R Us on a Saturday morning
That plastic-and-cardboard smell
Like possibility was a product
Old on Aisle 7, next to the action figures
And the bright yellow giraffe
Who never asked anything of you
Except that you come back, come back, come back
But somewhere between thirteen and twenty-three,
The doors just . . . closed
Not just the world of wonder and being free
The lights went out, the shelves went bare,
And nobody told us that was the last time.
Nobody said: Hey kid, soak this in
This is it, this is the good part
This is the part you’ll spend the rest of your life missing
I hated growing up. I begged for it.
I wanted the keys, the freedom, the late nights —
And now I’d give every sleepless Sunday
For one more Saturday morning breakfast,
The couch still warm, the cereal still sweet,
My biggest problem being a summer day’s heat
Outside all day, running around with friends
That don’t quite know this is the best way to grow
For we had it made and we didn’t even know
We traded mud on our knees
For social media screens.
We traded screaming in the street at dusk
For likes that never fill you up
Always scrolling, always watching
Until we were drowning in the feeds
The filters, the frowns without faces,
The crowds without places
Wishing you could go back to that time
As a kid where nothing mattered but fun
Our generation was the last
When the streetlights came on
The last to knock on a door
Instead of sending a text
Genuinely, gloriously bored —
And forced to build entire worlds
Out of sticks and mud and borrowed time
Kids these days will never know
What it felt like to be unreachable
To be just gone for an afternoon
No location shared. No story posted.
Just gone alive somewhere in the neighborhood
Free in a way that doesn’t exist anymore
So where did the magic go?
For convenience. For connection.
For the illusion of never being alone
That somehow made us lonelier
I regret wanting to grow up
On some ordinary Tuesday,
To look around at the kitchen table,
My mom’s hands, my dad’s laugh,
The dog on the floor, the TV too loud —
Maybe it’s something your mom played
In the car with the broken AC,
Windows down, hair wild, July heat
Sitting on your skin like it belongs there
And for three minutes and forty-two seconds
You are nine years old again
Or maybe it’s a smell, clean and pure and free
That stops you in your tracks and there’s the glee
Of walking into a public elementary school
On the first day after a summer feeling alive
The smell of crayons, the chatter of friends
Old textbooks handed down from years past
Regardless, the flashbacks hit like a train —
The summer, the yard, the sprinkler
The taste of a freeze pop, food coloring
The way the ice stung your teeth
And you didn’t care, not even a little
Sitting in a room that smells like coffee and adulthood
The world is back to the grayscale it became
When one day, you woke up and the magic
Was gone, the whimsy that kept you alive
Now a hollow in the back of your throat
And you wonder where it went, when everything
Started going wrong, when you started to care
Because after that, it was always there
For a time we didn’t know was precious
