Photographs
on my dressing table
and your chin
does that thing
where it wobbles
like you’re about to cry.
I stop complaining
for just a moment
just to ask
what you’re looking at
and you point
at the photograph
on my dressing table.
And I want to be angry.
But I’m tired
way too tired to be mad.
I was sixteen
in that photograph
Felt more like I was
sixty
eighteen now
and feeling a lot closer
to eighty
Every year a decade
of impotent rage
of adolescent angst
but how?
I’m sixty or eighty.
In that picture I’m laughing.
I don’t know why
nothing to laugh about
at sixty
or sixteen
I want to be angry
because you think I should be
laughing
like in the picture
not angry
like I am now.
but I am angry
because that picture
misrepresents
Nora at sixteen
or Nora at sixty
I did not laugh like that
I do not laugh like that
I do not know her.
That girl in the picture
looks happy.
She looks like me.
But happy.
May 17, 2012
May 17, 2012 at 8:31 PM UTC
Photographs
on my dressing table
and your chin
does that thing
where it wobbles
like you’re about to cry.
I stop complaining
for just a moment
just to ask
what you’re looking at
and you point
at the photograph
on my dressing table.
And I want to be angry.
But I’m tired
way too tired to be mad.
I was sixteen
in that photograph
Felt more like I was
sixty
eighteen now
and feeling a lot closer
to eighty
Every year a decade
of impotent rage
of adolescent angst
but how?
I’m sixty or eighty.
In that picture I’m laughing.
I don’t know why
nothing to laugh about
at sixty
or sixteen
I want to be angry
because you think I should be
laughing
like in the picture
not angry
like I am now.
but I am angry
because that picture
misrepresents
Nora at sixteen
or Nora at sixty
I did not laugh like that
I do not laugh like that
I do not know her.
That girl in the picture
looks happy.
She looks like me.
But happy.
Request permission to use this poem