Poem

So many people I love having become
corporate lawyers there is clearly nothing
to do but get very drunk & put my hand
through a window but happily happily! Yesterday
I turned 28 in less than 10 days it will be
15 years since my mother died which is
2 years more than I was alive when it happened.
Her name was Cecilia. It's on my arm in ink
forever, or for the terribly finite number
of years allotted to me I like to call
forever, which as you & I both know is anything
but. I call you you & I call myself I
but you & I both know the self has called
itself terribly into question is there anything
more boring? Racism is boring, less
because it is lacking in wit & more because
it is "one of the too many ways we've learned to hurt
the people we love, or ought to," which is a clumsy
paraphrase of something the woman I love,
who isn't a corporate lawyer, said to me
& messed me up with, which she does often & which
is one of the too many reasons I'm falling apart
with happiness. Her name, or one of them, is
Cecilia—strange, no? I'm terribly sorry
if I've ever done anything to cause
you hurt you don't deserve it. Everyone
I love is either a genius or very depressed
or a corporate lawyer or some combination
thereof. They don't deserve any of it,
even their genius, sadly, but they have it
or are it all the same. I deserve nothing
& yet here I am, full of a somethingness
called love, called grief, called Cecilia. & here
I'll be for the rest of my little forever, calling
my lawyer, my broker, my advisers on the phone
every night & laughing hysterically at
their terrible racist jokes. I'm done. Hi Mom!

Copyright © 2008 Nico Alvarado-Greenwood All rights reserved
from Thermos
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission