Pulling 30

Like Jacob Marley or Atlas,
I'm pulling the weight,
all the weight,
pulling the weight of
my history.

It ain't easy.

Existential Angst

It seems that when I pulled
a part of a poem with this
phrase in it for a college
project, I was naming
my disease, and the thing
that would haunt me from
that moment on.

Existential angst.

I just don't know what to do with myself.

And the real problem is,
neither does anyone else,
which would be fine, but
I know even with my
limited interpersonal skills,
there really shouldn't be
this huge a problem, as I'm
pulling 30, such a sustained
inability to make meaningful
connections with others.

It makes one think that
as far as the world is
concerned, they are pretty
worthless.

I'm arrogent enough to have
assumed otherwise.

Usually, as far as I can
tell, that's not usually
such a stumbling block.

But I could be wrong.

I believe in me.
I believe in me.
I believe in me.

The Scouring Monk, the Invisible Man

Unwanted by the world,
I could only entertain myself
in fictional ones.

Betrayed on all sides,
I became an island of one.

Every time I demonstrated
a spark of potential,
I was left behind by everyone.

I became a scouring monk,
not because I wanted to,
but because I had to.

I became an invisible man,
a pariah, anathema
to all the world,
though I did my best
with what I had
to contribute.

It was never enough,
and every cheek turned
away, every shoulder.

What else could result
from this?

Some rough miracle?

The Gauntlet

Being a creative writer,
or so I've learned,
is a little like
being thrown into
a gauntlet, with the mere hope
that you will be noticed
for your bravery.

Sometimes, perhaps most times,
it isn't even about talent,
but about the people
you can impress, and it won't
even be about what you do
in that gauntlet.

You can literally kill yourself
in there, and then maybe
they'll talk about you,
but then, half the point
will be kind of missed, won't it?

So tell me, why does it have
to be that way?

The Boxer

Working in retail
is a little like
being a boxer,
especially one
trying to work
their way up
or near the end
of their career.

Sure, maybe you
have some people
who believe in you,
but guess who's getting
all the punches?

But I have to go
with a different
metaphor (stuck
with that one
because I liked
the title).

Being in retail
is like playing
for a professional
sports team, which
I will specify here
as a baseball club.

No matter how
you do personally,
everyone's going
to think of your
team based on
how it's actually
doing, and base
their expectations
and frustrations
on that.

If you're losing,
you're worth
less than nothing.

They'll still expect
the world of you,
but they won't care
what kind of pressure
that actually is
to work under.

They only want results,
and they don't care
how you're actually
doing, just that
your whole team
can't seem to win.

Now amplify that
for the Boston market,
where even heroes
can quickly turn
into goats (yes,
even I have been
guilty of this one),
at the drop of a dime.

It's tough to be a star.

And then transfer that
into an experience
that pays far less
and expects far more
with the belief that
you can be replaced
very easily, no matter
what you can actually
do, and based only
on the most minimal
of observations.

And then there's customers.

They don't see you at all,
even when you're the best
thing to happen to them
all year at least.

They only see something
that is supposed to
answer their questions
and give them their
products and send them
on their way.

They hardly even appreciate
any of it, and definitely
don't remember it.

And if you don't meet
even the most unreasonable
of demands, then you
are the villain,
you are anathema,
just like that.

In retail,
it's legal to
slander reputations.

Ain't that grand?

The Obstructionists

Whether they mean to or not,
whether they know they're doing it or not,
whether it's me or not,
whether it actually works or not,
whether it's helpful or not,
I cannot abide the business of obstructionists.

But hey, that's life.

My So-Called French Heritage

It can be a little tough
sometimes
to know a lot of people
don’t have this problem.

They know exactly
where they come from
and what that means.

I don’t mean to suggest
that I don’t.

I know both sides of my family
come from French-speaking
Canada, that they were lured here
on the basis of a better life,
same as pretty much
everyone else.

I know that the generations
including my parents
spoke French regularly.

I know that my grandfather
spoke it exclusively.

I know that because every time
we would visit, that was all he would speak,
and that was just another feature
of what it meant to visit him.

I knew French as a secret language,
something my parents would use
when they didn’t want us to know
what they were saying (mostly
when they argued, I think).

We learned to pray in French,
but that was it.

I struggled through several years
of French in school, rebelling
against learning it, catching just enough
for middling grades.

On 9/11, I skipped French class
and that was the only happy memory
from that day.

I’m not going to use any French here,
a strictly unilingual poem.

I don’t know if that’s out of shame
or relief, because I don’t
have to bother with it
anymore.

We grew up Catholic,
so that’s as much culture
as was practiced in the household,
and there’s nothing much French
about that, except maybe
immigrant faith
(I don’t know).

I never knew what it was
to be French, what my ancestors
thought about it.

Mostly, I have gleamed
what I know
from popular culture.

I am supposed to be a romantic.

That’s as much as I know.

Somehow I feel a little robbed,
but at the same time, I find
that I don’t really care,
except when I’m wondering
what I may be missing.

I think that’s the kind
of experience that
will be more common
the more we progress
along the world of homogeny,
which I don’t say with denigration
but with a kind of admiration.

If I wanted to, I could learn
everything I wanted to know
tomorrow.

Everything that’s French
still exists. I still have family,
even in Canada (with a kind of saint
somewhere back there, maybe
looking over me, as he opens
the doors to prayer without fail).

There’s France, obviously,
which left such a bad impression
on me this past decade, leading a charge
against global reason, isolationism
(which is about as opposite of French
as I can imagine, from all that
I have gathered) its apparent
rallying cry.

Well, it certainly
left me in tears.

I’ve talked with my mother
about a lot of things, a lot
of her experiences growing up,
what she knows about her
family, but I wonder if
I shouldn’t start there,
ask more questions,
be more curious.

Hey, having a counterfeit
French connection
is curious enough already,
isn’t it?

I might as well continue.

The more people try
to differentiate themselves,
the more they discover,
possibly,
somewhere in the end,
that they’re not all that different
after all.

I wonder if that’s what
I’ll find out.

I don’t know what it means
to be French,
I have no practical
understanding,
no sense of the culture.

I live in a void,
and make things up
as I go.

Really, I’m not so different.

But I would like to know
some ways that I am
the same.