It’s a nameless decade,
he thinks,
when you’ve been working the same shameless
rite of passage, the same unpredictable gig,
for so long that you get to be a luckless,
questionable veteran at 35.

It’s a faceless point in a lifetime where everyone else
around him is celebrating births, taxes, new apartments,
and the part-time sweepstakes in slow-motion.

It’s okay to have nothing coming up
when no one’s asking him what’s going down.

That’s what a failed poet told him
when his parents left him with Santa Claus one weekend
when he was four. He used to sign that under a fake name,
in books that belonged to his ex-girlfriends’ new boyfriends.

Kind of a silly thing to say or write now,
so he sticks to relieving its glory days
exclusively in the universal brotherhood church of his mind.

And that’s okay, man.
That’s okay.

It’s about as bad as learning to dance
when you’re falling down a flight of stairs.

He always gets it together.
He always stays out late.
He always finds a way to get the top off his latest used car.

He can even almost always tell the difference
between the girls who really are waiting for friends,
and the ones who are waiting for a sucker like him.

A sucker who knows he’s a sucker. And he’ll take that
over a somber ceremony in Wilmington. The bride
looking cheated, haggard and twelve months pregnant.

Or whatever the hell the latest stranger from a strange land
is doing next weekend.

It’s impossible not to see the stupid picture,
but he always has enough self-control
to stop reading the rest of the wedding invitation.

High school must have been a big place after all, he thinks.
Once a month, he saves up enough to let them
fly out
of the backseat
and into the non-discriminating open air.

He becomes a madman for a minute,
laughs as the wind tries to rip his scalp off,
pretends the invitations are hundred dollar bills,
and heads off to find a dark-haired kitten
to help him spend this month’s rent.

12/18/2012

Posted on 12/19/2012
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