Double Abecedarian: Zeitgeist
All that summer, when I could still drink sloe gin fizz
but Scotch was becoming my favorite, our misery
continued. Tom was in his usual flux,
demonstrating his freedom by trying to screw
every girl I knew. I was reading Nabokov,
flirting with the idea of moving to Peru,
going to life-drawing classes, hoping the next
hurricane would be The Big One. Tom’s
idiot brothers were doing no better:
Jack dropped out and started writing his name J-a-q,
Kevin almost got picked out of a lineup—
losers! And then Tom decides to become a gigolo.
Maybe in a year I’ll move to Berlin,
not Lima, I voiced, and in the interim
outfit myself for some lofty intellectual
pursuit like Linguistics. 'Tom’, I would ask,
quite seriously, ‘I’m planning my hajj,
remember me when I’m gone, would you? I
seem not to matter to you all that much.’
To be honest, I’d have thought about taking
up snake-handling to relieve the ennui, if
vanity hadn’t been a consideration. Where
were our parents, you ask? Why, drunk! I’ve decided
xenophilia wasn’t so dumb. My sister’s a mystic,
you dabble in opiates, we all obsess on Hurricane Bob—
zeitgeist of the ‘Seventies in South Carolina.
All that summer, when I could still drink sloe gin fizz
but Scotch was becoming my favorite, our misery
continued. Tom was in his usual flux,
demonstrating his freedom by trying to screw
every girl I knew. I was reading Nabokov,
flirting with the idea of moving to Peru,
going to life-drawing classes, hoping the next
hurricane would be The Big One. Tom’s
idiot brothers were doing no better:
Jack dropped out and started writing his name J-a-q,
Kevin almost got picked out of a lineup—
losers! And then Tom decides to become a gigolo.
Maybe in a year I’ll move to Berlin,
not Lima, I voiced, and in the interim
outfit myself for some lofty intellectual
pursuit like Linguistics. 'Tom’, I would ask,
quite seriously, ‘I’m planning my hajj,
remember me when I’m gone, would you? I
seem not to matter to you all that much.’
To be honest, I’d have thought about taking
up snake-handling to relieve the ennui, if
vanity hadn’t been a consideration. Where
were our parents, you ask? Why, drunk! I’ve decided
xenophilia wasn’t so dumb. My sister’s a mystic,
you dabble in opiates, we all obsess on Hurricane Bob—
zeitgeist of the ‘Seventies in South Carolina.