Terrifying News

Dinner last night:
college friends –
in and out of each other’s
sight for over thirty years –
pursuing elevated ends –
cheerful chatter –
sweet smart soft natter –

partly meant to flatter –
mostly far more
inexplicably attached
to motive. Involuntarily
I find myself revisiting
myself at twenty-one,
and oh! – it isn’t fun.

Whatever plenty
one may sentimentally
ascribe to youth, reveals,
three decades on,
another truth: a quagmire
of the heart, in which
one cannot think

what part of one
is best, but one is certain
there’s a test, and one
assumes, on pain
of psychic death,
that one must choose.
Terrifying news.




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