poem of the day 05.22.13

fifty with earrings

i don’t want to be fifty with earrings

it never bothered me before

but looking at these guys in the airport

sitting there with coffee-stained teeth and nicotine fingers

a row of old men, fifty years-old at least

in earrings of different sized gauges

i think i need to get these dangling hoops out

before i reach that inevitable age

and someone feels the same way when they look at me

i don’t even know why i got

my earrings in the first place

or the tattoos that i have

none of it made me look or act any cooler

they certainly never got me more ass

than was already in the cards

at the time i think i was bored and wanted to look different

no one i knew had earrings

in my neighborhood you were a fag if you had earrings

my old man looked at my earrings and shook his head

went back to the evening paper and beer

but i was nineteen or twenty then

and i did everything within my limited social power

to look a little bit different from the yokels in my neighborhood

now i’m thirty-nine and i’m in bed most nights by ten

the guys in my neighborhood are all fat with loud kids

i worry about gray hair every day

and my tattoos have faded into a strange green

at random vain moments i’ll ask my wife, is this gray hair?

when i talk to younger people i always wonder

if they’re looking at the gray in my beard, my sides

and now thanks to these dudes in the airport

i’ll always wonder if they think

i’m some dumb old man wearing earrings

to try and look younger

i mean these geriatrics in this terminal

look like a bad german cover band from the 1980s

doomed to dress a certain way for the money

no one’s paying me shit to wear my earrings

and i have no clue how to be cool anymore

i probably never did

shit, if getting old isn’t hard

it comes with too much baggage

too much self-consciousness just walking out the door

but maybe it’s just me

i’m sure there are other men my age who love their earrings

bruce springsteen still has them and he’s what?

sixty-something?

but he wrote born to run

so….

and i’m sure there are men my age

who are out right now getting a new tattoo on their arms

and finding new music to listen to

while i’ve been listening to the same shit for twenty years

there’s some guy my age staring into a mirror

and nodding his head at how cool he is

because some twenty year-old chick told him

that she liked men with gray hair

but that shit hasn’t happened to me

all i have are these old goats waiting with me for a plane to berlin

their earrings making them look like clowns

like they didn’t know when to stop and just let age take its course

but that won’t be me

as soon as i get home

i’m taking these fucking earrings out of my ear

and i don’t care if that makes me shallow

i won’t be fifty with earrings

i won’t be thirty-nine

man, i just won’t.