(With Vermont Thoughts of Autumn Leaves)
Everyone’s totally over me
and passive aggressively
moving on. That was the
fork in the road the led to
a dead end, it’s easy to
surmise. The dead end
of now, which has lasted
a few years. Nearly a
decade. Didn’t I write
something called “Now
is going to take some
time,” at some point,
pre-Now? I try to
concentrate on the
happy that will come,
on the post-Now. If
you find that you’ve
driven to a dead-end,
isn’t it fairly easy to
do a U-turn and drive
back to the road from
which you stupidly
exited? Why couldn’t I,
just for once, have followed
the map that I’d been given.
I can feel my face turn red
at this thought, my genetics
are inclined to face-reddening,
but I’ve learned to generally,
more often than not, disallow
the anger that would normally
accompany a flushed face. One
can defy some aspects of genetics,
can’t do a darned thing about other
aspects of it. What steps up in place
of anger is a sort of sheer disappointment
that has me nostalgic for the short temper
that has come at me from all directions,
my family tree would look as if it were
plucked from Vermont on a particularly
beautiful day, say, in mid-October.
