Archive | 3:49 pm

The World Is A Shrivelled Raisin

18 Oct

And we’re the global generation

With our frequent flyer miles

Our fluency in foreign tongues

And friends across continents.

…

We fill our hollows with zinfandel

And raise toasts to 18-hour workdays

And rattle off names of all the massages

We need to de-stress, unwind, feel human again.

…

Strange words we consume,

Rigatoni, kim chi, sake and bagels,

And molten meltdowns in the candle-scented café

At the corner of 7th and 17th.

…

With our international degrees

And accents from back home

We walk our pedicured feet around cities

With elation, with pride, with joy,

That comes from loving

Securely one’s own.

…

Relationships are always in the plural,

Commitment necessitates a therapist and much pondering

And babies before 30 is suicide:

Only fools or the very brave would attempt it.

…

We have memories of snowstorms

And Mardi gras parades

And none of the nights

We stumbled home drunk.

…

And reunions stir up nostalgia

That only barely settles

At the bottom of our core

Threatening to regurgitate

At a moment’s notice

(And sometimes, not even that.)

…

We dance the salsa with abandon

Reworking the heavy kathak tread

Learned in a blurred, sepia childhood,

Our bodies unashamed,

Our spirits unfettered

Our lives the way we dreamed them.

…

And pillows are for soaking

All the broken dreams

That look around quickly

Before gushing forth and flooding

The silent, unjudging night.


P.S. Haaaaalp! How does one add line breaks to this darn thing?!