Back at Your Place

when you're nobody special,

no one in particular besides 

your particular self, with those

eyebrows of yours and memories

of a childhood pond-raft called

"Sinking Slowly," a taste 

for fried trout and boiled potatoes,

an innate attraction to women

whose figures (a euphemism)

some people called "voluptuous,"

your sad, haphazard collections

of stamps and baseball cards

(the latter cut clumsily from

cereal boxes), your affection

for a tan chenille bed-spread

(and for the term "bed-spread"),

and a relationship to books

some found overly intense, then

it's hard, when you go to school,

to work and parties, events

and protests; yes, it's difficult

to become the additional and 

enhanced other, the one you're

expected to be, a Situational

You. It is exhausting, in fact,

and back at your place, again,

resting, reading, perhaps thinking

of a voluptuous woman with

whom you engaged in awkward

discourse while inhaling her

natural and manufactured

perfumes, you might ask, 

with tiresome faux naivete, 

"Whose idea was Society,

anyway?" Anyway, you are

and shall remain, just you. 

hans ostrom 2021