Decalogue, Part Five
Isn’t it a funny that the same songs
played too loudly
at fifteen
calm a new spring
of flowing tears at twenty-three (I
can’t wait to be twenty-four, at
least that’s a number I can memorize
and in a few months, I won’t need to
count the long way on my fingers
the distance between 1986 and 2001).
Saturday nights can be so,
so violent.
At twenty-three, just as fifteen,
I find myself the only adult, the only
reasonable person in a kitchen full
of children. Children grown and
resentful. Strong willed and wild
with the new elixir that stops
the shaking in their hands that
started one morning they cannot remember.
Tomorrow morning,
they cannot remember.
And the flashbacks to this memory
leave me stubborn. Unwilling.
On some sort of self-inflicted bed
rest. I can’t focus. I can’t
even have the conversation. And
I will require years of
manufactured microdrama to avoid
any mention of these details.
I guess in this respect I am lucky.
Your meanness, it turns out, is not
a byproduct of alcohol. And I am
still smart only by books, intelligence
unearned and lacking life experience.
As though you did not hand me the life
experience on so many similar nights,
I am still the entitled bitch
I was (three fingers and
one fully extended hand ago).