A tiny cassette fastened to the day,
it clipped the future onto denim seams,
and turned the schoolyard air into a play.
The plastic body hummed in private dreams,
a song too loud for something so contained,
yet lived inside a pocket full of beams.
Each button pressed released what was restrained,
a chorus spilling out from colored shell,
where childhood’s noise was carefully unchained.
It made the ordinary briefly swell,
a walk to class a soundtrack on repeat,
a world that only we could hear so well.
And though the device was small and incomplete,
it taught us how to carry sound along—
a portable and restless kind of beat.