The Fraternity
All the crazy fucking college kids have come back to Boston
after summers in New York and brothels,
Paris and Washington,
getting their kicks out on Pennsylvania Avenue
so they can return to the Back Bay, Cambridge,
and tell their dorm room, sorority, wanker college friends
how much money they spent on beer and tonsil surgery,
the last night on the big boat and the twelve hundred times
they got laid
even if they never took off their clothes.
They’re insane in spandex and tank tops,
on bicycles that mean nothing
even though Heidegger is right around the corner
and Abnormal Psych
with the lithe professor
from Madagascar
who likes his fast cars because he knows
the truth about acceleration
under mamma’s skirt.
It’s enough to make me a fucking crazy college kid myself.
But I did that already,
cocaine filled shampoo bottles and that night
we slashed the Iranian Prince’s tires
because my roommate didn’t like the way the guy looked
at his Christian girlfriend, who,
Christmas break,
went to the basement
where her father kept the shotguns
and messed up her face.
We sobered up for fifteen minutes after that,
then the Space Shuttle blew up.
I knew a girl named Chloe. I knew a girl named Christine.
I didn’t know enough ways to stop smoking dope
and no one taught me.
Kids tossed empty kegs at moving cars.
We shot bottle rockets in the dorm room showers.
It made me think, Heidegger, you fucking idiot, save us!
Now, when I drive my kid from one end of Newton to the other,
packs of eighteen year olds from Boston College and MIT,
Lesley and Northeastern,
roam the streets in packs.
The young women are giraffes, the boys,
hyenas and thieves.
Honey, I turn around to say,
snap the tendons in my neck,
don’t look.
The kids shitting on lawns,
eating ferns and flower beds,
mounting one another
by stop signs.
Stop, I scream, but no one can hear me,
my kid in the back, saying Daddy, check that out.
That’s when I close my eyes,
push, pray,
my foot
all the way down on the gas.
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