The Retrospective

They say that hindsight is twenty-twenty.

I say hindsight is right on the money.

Everything that happened went exactly your way,

Exactly the way you wanted it to,

Exactly the way that it should have gone.

Who cares that it's already done?

It's not a matter of who can prove otherwise,

But a matter of the fact that nobody bothers.

Writers live their lives for the retrospective,

For the leftovers that taste even better.

Running In Place

Technically, it was I who did the leaving.

I couldn't take all the running in place,

Couldn't take you wanting to run away.

Whatever “us” was

(and for a while, it was fun,)

Lives an afterhalflife as a ghost of a memory,

Decaying and moving further away

Without ever actually going anywhere.

As our anniversary approaches,

I might move closer to the memory,

But make no mistake,

I didn't kill a lifetime in a parallel universe

Waiting to come back to you.

Spangled With Dandelions

I crave the long grass, spangled with dandelions,

Away from Sunday's sunburned, misguided beauticians,

Free from the confines of rectangles and squares,

Where the round, rolling toes of the foothills

and pyramids beyond all Egypt's comprehension

Replace the knee-grinding right angles of stairs.

The thought of these things, and their closeness, tantalizes.

I know that even though I haven't started leaving,

I'm already most of the way there.

The New Masculinity

The old heroes have grayed,

Died and been replaced,

As has the archnemesis,

Rendered politically useless.

The new hero only fights the evil

That lives within his own soul.

The new masculinity, manliless,

Is barely strong enough to defeat itself.

A Waste of Gas

I like to drive around at night,

Speakers a little up,

Windows all the way down,

and I have no idea why.

It looks kind of suspicious,

It's a waste of gas,

and the size of my tank

Limits how long it lasts,

But it's mostly harmless

With no one else there.

It's freeing sometimes, knowing

That no one else cares.

...Said the Semi-Professional Expert on Doing Everything Wrong

It's not that I'm enough to have a chance.

It's not that I'm dumb enough to think

That I have a chance.

It's not like I don't know I'm wasting my time

Thinking about it.

It's not like it's a pleasant way to pass the time.

It's just that I've got the time,

and you're more interesting than the rest.

I Know You/I Didn't

It seems strange to say that I know you from high school,

Because I didn't know you in high school.

You were someone I admired from afar, afraid to approach

and dumb enough to know better than to try,

and now that we have been formally introduced

I know how right I was, and I know how wrong I was.

It seems strange to say that I know you from high school

Because even college has been a while,

and it seems strange to say that I still know you.