P-WORD
Okay, I'm going there, talking about the p-word. I do know that there are actual and very serious cases, but what I'm talking about in this poem is how every dip in life can now be labeled and/or medicated. Maybe we'll get a Tom Cruise/Brooke Shields type of debate going . . .
With a Label Comes an Excuse
J.B. Rowell
Sure my hormones are flux,
but they’ve been that way since my first
period, and maybe before that,
preteen, teen, weren’t we hormonal then?
How else can I explain my crush
on the boy with the girl’s
name and bad shirts?
The one who used me and I knew it and I let him.
The one who drank Tang
and played the sax.
Now I have a second baby
with the man I love,
the one who is following his bliss by still
being in grad school, the one I resent.
And I can’t seem to get myself off the coach
or do housework of any kind anymore.
So I can blame my blah way of being
on my baby (who is really now a toddler)
or maybe on the fact that I stopped nursing him,
yeah, I have the post-weaning blues.
When my children grow up and out,
I’ll have an empty nest to wallow in
with more handy excuses
having to do with getting old.
Put a pre- and a post-
before the word menopause,
and you can really drag it on until
death. So the label I’m really looking for,
for letting go, is called life,
Full of hormones and disappointment.
That’s enough of an excuse,
and not one at all.
With a Label Comes an Excuse
J.B. Rowell
Sure my hormones are flux,
but they’ve been that way since my first
period, and maybe before that,
preteen, teen, weren’t we hormonal then?
How else can I explain my crush
on the boy with the girl’s
name and bad shirts?
The one who used me and I knew it and I let him.
The one who drank Tang
and played the sax.
Now I have a second baby
with the man I love,
the one who is following his bliss by still
being in grad school, the one I resent.
And I can’t seem to get myself off the coach
or do housework of any kind anymore.
So I can blame my blah way of being
on my baby (who is really now a toddler)
or maybe on the fact that I stopped nursing him,
yeah, I have the post-weaning blues.
When my children grow up and out,
I’ll have an empty nest to wallow in
with more handy excuses
having to do with getting old.
Put a pre- and a post-
before the word menopause,
and you can really drag it on until
death. So the label I’m really looking for,
for letting go, is called life,
Full of hormones and disappointment.
That’s enough of an excuse,
and not one at all.
posted by J.B. Rowell at 9:59 AM
1 Comments:
This makes me think of the movie out right now -- Weather Man. In it, Nicolas Cage plays a depressed divorced dad trying to help his troubled kids. Anyway, at one point, his father who is dying, says to him :"Easy" doesn't enter into grown-up life... to get anything of value, you have to sacrifice. Perhaps the real problem lies in our unrealistic expectations. It's a thought....
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