Everyone Who Talks to Me

“Adenoids” – the word was always plural –

“antebellum” – “orthopedic” – “cantilevered”

all were evidence that grown-ups used a language

so fantastically peculiar it did not remotely

seem to me, who couldn’t have been too much

more than three when I discovered how to form

the sounds to say them, that they’d ever be

intrinsic to my lexicon.

Mostly what perplexed

was the apparent certainty that everyone

would grow up to be grown-up and would know,

for instance, words like lexicon and why some markets

sold and traded stocks, whatever stocks were,

and what anguished ladies in old films

like “Stella Dallas”

had to do with.

I’m still not sure I know,

or by the time I exit

will have known, what

any definition of a single element,

phenomenon or thing

I am supposed to know

now that I’m held to be a grownup

was or is. Nothing’s

anything at all

may be the only definition from which I derive

some tiny sense of leaning toward a meaning

I might one day find I can declare.

This may be why everyone

who talks to me

before long seems to wish

I weren’t there.

.