I.
Today I’ll listen to whatever music Spotify has in mind.
Concerto for Black Holes and Slime Molds by the Panty Sniffers?
That algorithm knows me so well! I’ve pitched myself under
this magnolia tree, heart first, before I get lobbed anyplace
worse. No more of grandpa’s stuffed marlin glaring at me
from the living-room wall, no more robocalls offering
to restructure debt never incurred, no more doomscrolling
(for the moment.) I’ve retreated to the bosom of nature,
where bird chirps whirr like sticks being fed into a wood
chipper and magnolia leaves clatter into my lap like leather
wings. Mari has flown off to Mexico. She believes in UFOs.
She wants to be called Marigold now, to leave her sad past
behind and bask in the mysteries of sex and drugs
and panhandling and side hustles and is that really so bad?
II.
It seems really bad, or at least alarming to me, though
I, too, was a hot mess in my twenties, so long ago,
in a different era and circumstance. I’m still a sunken
ship riddled with eels. I’ll admit that up front.
But, since I’m using Marigold’s travels and travails
as a thinly veiled excuse to blab about myself,
let’s get back to her. Marigold’s nose runs constantly.
She suffers from asthma and eczema. She loves animals,
toddlers, psychedelics, and girl bands. We share three
of these four loves, since I’ve been reduced by advancing
age to pretending I prefer booze to hallucinogens.
In the violent tides of her twenties, Marigold shed
the last of her baby fat, then graduated from stumbling
spiritual seeker to apprentice sensualist. She wants, she wants.
III.
She wants to spit in capitalism’s tea, impress older,
heavily tattooed fellow sensualists (the kinds that leave
teeth marks), kick patriarchy in the nut sack, darken
her hands with red and ochre dirts of other worlds,
learn five languages (but only by osmosis) while chasing
ninety-nine kinds of buzz and trying to pull free
from the tar pit of history. At her age, one is pure urge.
Life is a wildfire. So it’s no big sin that her bedroom
resembles a place where, among all their hoardings,
a pair of hoarders just staged a 24-hour wrestling match.
I just worry about her. Like I have the right, me,
who brims with wrongful convictions all day then tucks
herself into bed each night with ten stuffed animals
and an Ambien sandwich. So what am I trying to say?
IV.
Am I saying, Marigold, that in your attempts to enter
heaven you’re crashing the wrong gates? That I wish
you’d find life-guiding messages someplace other
than in sidewalk scatters of pollen? Oops, I do
that, not you. Clearly projection is one of my sins.
Maybe your determination to get lost is a valid response
to any decade in which people feel they’re about to be
vaporized daily. It’s a crippling time to be young.
I want the magnolia to reach down its branches
and hug me. My twenties were a rapturous tantrum
during which I aspired to be lady, tiger, and pirate
rolled into one. When I try to recall that madness,
it seems like it never really happened, or as if it did,
to someone, but I’m not sure I was ever there myself.