poem of the day 11.07.12

you can’t go home again
 

but you can waste hours

scanning the faces of people on social networks

remembering the old bullies

from grade school

and all of the pretty girls who’ve gone gray

and you can make ten hour playlists

of all the old songs

play them on your morning walk all week

moving to the beat of endless regret

and you can see the faces of friends

who have vanished

like the thick blue smoke of first sickly cigarettes

on the way home from high school

or flaky snuff vomited on those safe childhood streets

contemplate your own insignificance

then

and now

picture endless do-overs in your head

first poems scribbled on homemade comic books

the fights you backed away from

the girl with the sweet face in the front seat

of some ugly jock’s car

and how you never talked to her

even though she gave you guns’n’roses

nerf football championships

and wiffleball world series

the smell of home on a wednesday night

you can’t go home again

no

old tommy wolfe was right about that

but you can kill the now

obsessing over the unmovable feast of time

until it makes you grow sullen and mad

paralyzed on a street corner

looking at the sagging man in the warped window

of a discount store

wondering where and when

it all

went

knowing that it wasn’t that good in the first place

but for some reason

how right then

you’d wish it all back.