poem of the day 01.13.15

tore her up

barry would always

complain about his younger wife

we’d be driving to deliver windows and doors

and he would just start out of the blue

she doesn’t understand me, man,

he’d tell me

i was a philosopher

i was into art history before i met her

i read and re-read all of those novels

i see you reading on your lunch

christ, barry, i’d say

then i’d look out onto the bleak

western new york landscape

wondering if this was the best i could do

i realize that she’s only twenty-two

and that i’m thirty-eight, barry would say

but i was a scholar

a man of letters

i could tell picasso’s just by looking at them

picasso isn’t that hard, i told him

you’d have better luck bragging about andre derain

you don’t understand

all she talks about is the baby

and rent and food and bills and how she had

to drop out of college to pay for the baby

and rent and food and bills

i have no intellectual stimulation

when it got too much

sometimes barry would park the truck

he’d turn to me

why did i do it, man?

an underage piece of ass in a bar

a couple of stupid night in my apartment

and now it’s all this

let’s have a beer, i said to him

then we’d drive to a convenience store

and get a couple of tall boys

while snow fell all over western new york

usually about half-way through the beer

was the time barry would pull out his wallet

it was always the same picture

of his wife before she had their baby

she was a good looking woman

she probably still was

barry was batting way out of his league

look at her, he’d say to me

he’d press the picture closer to my face

look how beautiful she was, he’d say

then he’d take a big gulp on the beer and be quiet for a bit

for a moment i’d thank a god that i didn’t believe in

then check my watch to see if i could get in another beer

i ruined her too, he’d eventually say

she was so young

she had such a body and such a future

but i tore her up

i tore up her young body and we had that kid

barry would put the picture back in his wallet

i sat there drinking while he held that square of beaten leather

knowing that in a minute or two he’d pull a one-eighty

and out would come the pictures of the kid

the inevitable conversation about how grand his life really was.