Regular Poem: Just Like the Old Days

I knew
several days ago
when he called me
that I would be writing
this poem
or some poem
very similar to it.

And here we are
smoking cigarettes
and drinking beer
and telling stories.

His stories are
cop stories,
stories of
one of these things is not like the other,

stories of
dumbasses
and crazies
and low-income housing.

And I am a sponge
but an inefficient and drunk one
absorbing and not absorbing,
everything slopping out of me
because the sponge is
saturated already.

And at the end I’m
driving home
giggling uncontrollably
at my life
and the way it’s turned out.

He saved
all my old report cards.
and they all
tell a story of their own.

He saved
all my old IEPs
and they
tell a story of their own.

He also saved
my mother’s glamour shots
from JC Penney
and they tell
a story, too.

And here I am,
still giggling.

And when two weeks later
I look at my garage–
you know my granny garage,
teeming with granny garbage,
trinkets and tools and trash–
and there is somehow
more,
and the yawning mouth of it
opens at me,
yowling at me that it is not yet
surfeited
and it could use
a 30-year old chest of drawers
and a few more boxes of junk,

I will laugh and tell it no,
tell it I will be excising
those tumors.

And it will laugh back
and tell me
I’ve never excised anything ever,
and why would I start now?

And I will laugh again
but only because
I won’t be woman enough to cry.

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