Thursday, April 9, 2015

poem of the day 04.09.15

forty one

i’m thinking of being forty one
rather i’m thinking about turning twenty one
which was twenty years ago

tonight i’m thinking about you, mary
all of those years back

how you sat scowling on the couch
watching saturday night live at the stroke of midnight
while i downed my first legal beer
with such good friends that i no longer have them

how i knew right then and there that we were through

remember you kept it going the whole next day
the standard rainy april in pittsburgh

moaning and bitching through some will smith movie
that they’ve made endless sequels to

my birthday and i didn’t even want to see it

christ, twenty years ago
and hollywood is still making the same shit

will smith still has a million dollar movie career
as i sit here turning old and gray

trying to make something decent of myself

forty one
it doesn’t sound so bad unless you’re looking in a mirror

but, of course, you’re older now too, mary
married and not even living in america

imagine if we’d gotten hitched
like you wanted to all of those years ago
when you connected our names in your notebooks

imagine the misery as i have

some suburban prison home
soulless jobs and passionless sex
two dumbass kids and a dvd shelf full of will smith movies

i hope you’re happy like i am that we got out

it’s been twenty years since we’ve seen each other
not even social networking
can fix what we’d damaged back then

what we never really had

mary, i try to think of you turning forty one too
i try to think of you happy when you were a girl

but all i ever remember
is the fight we had after that movie

some dumb argument over 2pac and rush
on the way to meet my family for my birthday dinner
a disagreement that escalated into madness

you told me i crossed a line
when i told you i’d rather have fucked a prostitute
than lost my virginity to you at nineteen

yet you still hung around for another seven months

ah, mary, the girlfriend of my youth
what can i say now but i’m sorry?

that i remember you fondly
sitting there crying in the car
the whole way to dinner

mary frozen in time at twenty years old

the first woman of many
who ever made me say out loud

jesus christ, i need a drink.


                                                            

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