"asshat" poems - Hello Poetry

The whole concept of adulthood is one that seems to trespass from the ever-anticipated world of the theoretical, just to barge into your life one night like an uninvited drunken friend. It will never really “hit you,” but it’ll come **** close the first time your aunt offers you a glass of wine as she and your mother gossip frankly about your father’s mistress— you sip on cheap Chardonnay and pretend to be used to the taste, as they talk with a middle-aged bitterness of the man you were raised to believe was too virtuous to be in debt for some glitzy engagement ring that he bought to restart his life with a woman he left your mother for shortly after the pandemonium of a guiltless affair. The man whose brutishness you were told to overlook, cradling the sparse memories of when he’d tuck you too tightly into bed, or when he’d tell you that he loved you even though half the time you really didn’t believe him— The man whose love confused you, whose clumsy attempts of fatherhood kept the heart of a young girl perpetually guarded by a cautious skepticism— The man who brought you into a world he found absurd as carelessly as he raised you to face it, torn apart like every illusion that makes a child, the ashes of which that slip through your fingers inevitably declare you another bitter adult. More wine will reveal that your beloved father is a controlling ****** and his relationship with that ***** the whole family hates only appears to be functioning because she lets him have all the control he couldn’t exert on your mother, even though you’ve had dinner with the two of them a couple of times and if you had met her under any other circumstance (though you’d feel like a traitor if you said it aloud) you wouldn’t think she was all that bad. In red, declarative letters I want to write to any children I may ever bear into this bittersweet game of ******** we play that we’ve since called ‘life,’ that when they first gaze with awe at the unattainable grace with which every grown-up seems to navigate the world they created, with all the pain of tax-paying and womanhood, I want to scream that we don’t know what the hell we’re doing either and if at any point I try to convince you otherwise you should tell your mother that she’s full of ****

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Nov 12, 2013

Nov 12, 2013 at 3:25 PM UTC

alyssa-rose-evans

"Adulthood" (revised)

The whole concept of adulthood is one that seems to trespass from the ever-anticipated world of the theoretical, just to barge into your life one night like an uninvited drunken friend. It will never really “hit you,” but it’ll come **** close the first time your aunt offers you a glass of wine as she and your mother gossip frankly about your father’s mistress— you sip on cheap Chardonnay and pretend to be used to the taste, as they talk with a middle-aged bitterness of the man you were raised to believe was too virtuous to be in debt for some glitzy engagement ring that he bought to restart his life with a woman he left your mother for shortly after the pandemonium of a guiltless affair. The man whose brutishness you were told to overlook, cradling the sparse memories of when he’d tuck you too tightly into bed, or when he’d tell you that he loved you even though half the time you really didn’t believe him— The man whose love confused you, whose clumsy attempts of fatherhood kept the heart of a young girl perpetually guarded by a cautious skepticism— The man who brought you into a world he found absurd as carelessly as he raised you to face it, torn apart like every illusion that makes a child, the ashes of which that slip through your fingers inevitably declare you another bitter adult. More wine will reveal that your beloved father is a controlling ****** and his relationship with that ***** the whole family hates only appears to be functioning because she lets him have all the control he couldn’t exert on your mother, even though you’ve had dinner with the two of them a couple of times and if you had met her under any other circumstance (though you’d feel like a traitor if you said it aloud) you wouldn’t think she was all that bad. In red, declarative letters I want to write to any children I may ever bear into this bittersweet game of ******** we play that we’ve since called ‘life,’ that when they first gaze with awe at the unattainable grace with which every grown-up seems to navigate the world they created, with all the pain of tax-paying and womanhood, I want to scream that we don’t know what the hell we’re doing either and if at any point I try to convince you otherwise you should tell your mother that she’s full of ****