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
