Here's a poem I like by a poet, William Matthews (pictured), who I think deserves a bigger audience. Generally speaking, poets deserve bigger audiences, but I digress. The title is "A Story Often Told in Bars: The Reader's Digest Version":
First I was born and it was tough on Mom.
Dad felt left out. There's much I can't recall.
I seethed my way to speech and said a lot
of things: some were deemed cute. I was so small
my likely chance was growth, and so I grew.
Long days in school I filled, like a spring creek,
with boredom. Sex I discovered soon
enough, I now think. Sweet misery!
There's not enough room in a poem so curt
to get me out of adolescence, yet
I'm nearing fifty with a limp, and dread
the way the dead get stacked up like a cord
of wood. Not much of a story, is it?
The life that matter's not the one I've led.
An alternate title might be "Song of Myself in Fourteen Lines." Yes, it's a bit of a downer, but our exclamatory times require an antidote. The "curt" poem does include an exclamation point--behind the near cliche "Sweet misery!" It's applied to sex but it occurs to me that it applies, too, to a consequence of sex: child-rearing, with all its tedium and joy, is a sweet misery. Maybe Matthews would say that all of life qualifies. Sweet misery!
