...And what was so goddamn great about being twenty-three?
Rage wracked and sad, left alone in a great big home
Endlessly reading useless novels, smoking cheap rollies.
Second childhood: couldn’t tell you if it was better than the first.
And I couldn’t tell you what I was up to when I was twenty.
Probably nothing. That was my modus operandi back then.
Twenty-eight was the year of the sell-out,
When I became a corporate shill and liked it.
But even as a punk, I just wanted a desk job.
Twenty-four must have been the wildest year
Late nights, naked and drunk and delirious
I was equally happy and devastated.
Woke up drunk on my twenty-first birthday
And in due time numbed the adventurous
Quality of late-night, beer-soaked bar tops.
Hell, for the first half of this decade I wanted to die,
But I didn’t know depression until I was twenty-six,
When I learned of the crushing exclusion of sex.
At twenty-two I began my career as a factotum
Ward of the state and spiraled out of emotional control
Oppressed by a megalomaniacal relationship
(I wasn’t even in!)
Contentment, complacency, compartmentalization
Convenient alliteration for twenty-five where I settled
Into a very agreeable routine and raged nightly.
Twenty-seven brought with it the greatest adventure,
A surprising amount of emotional fulfilment and
A seemingly endless supply of stories.
(So, it wasn’t that bad, really.)
What does my twenty-ninth year bring?
Will it be one of the depressive years?
Will it be one of the creative ones?
Will I travel the world or
Mope around in bars?
Whatever it may mean to me when I am thirty-nine,
I’m glad this decade is nearly over.
Good riddance to bad rubbish
And bring on the newest adventure.
Because if I learned nothing else from being
A useless twenty-something,
It’s how to have an adventure.
Listen!
In the dying desert of the Las Vegas Valley
Lay a lackluster poet whose weary wish
Rests in redemption…
