"WE BURNED THE HEADDRESS IN THE FOG=====I am playing gin rummy with your mother. I am staring down..."

“WE BURNED THE HEADDRESS IN THE FOG

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I am playing gin rummy with your mother. I am staring down her pink bathrobe at her tits. On the cards there are pictures of your mother crying and the cards are crying on the table which has no legs. They are wet and crying and she is crying too because you are fourteen and behind a dumpster with other fourteen year olds getting high because being fourteen is hard. Because being fourteen is an abandoned building of SORRY, mine shafts of CARE, is one touch too soon. Because being fourteen is a tatter of open eyes, one whole year of dirty hair, mesh and voicemails and condensed music that has nothing to do with the awkward way you talk. Because being fourteen is like being a billboard in a forest of sinking trees that advertises trees and blinks a tree time at every hour. Only the trees know what it means and whatever it means is sad like staring down your mother’s bathrobe. She wins every hand. Nothing has changed.”

- from Man vs. Sky, by Corey Zeller. My strongest response to this poem is the comparisons of 14 years old to a building and mine shafts. All that stuff about 14 years old is exactly what you would think it is. But it feels like it gets at that subtle yet pervasive dissatisfaction that just takes over your life. Many of the poems in this book propose a similar dynamic, where the speaker has some imaginative insight into some other figure (usually referred to in the second person, like this poem does). Here that other figure feels more concrete to me. I like that. I like when there’s this wise one who just has something to say about someone’s life, but it doesn’t feel like it will amount to anything consequential for that person’s life.