Seven Minutes in Heaven

It’s all the rage to sport waxed moustaches

and cure your own sausages

in some mildewy basement that formerly

would have hosted convulsively

awkward parties with spin the bottle and seven

minutes in the dark and terrifying closet

(aka heaven) but now boasts soppressata

strung on repurposed vintage drying racks

and fat clay pots of kombucha and curdling hops.

Personally I've never recovered from the sex-shaped

void left in those closets by all the groping

that should have occurred to me but didn't:

right under my nose kids my age were creeping

into adulthood one clammy, trembling palm

on one breast at a time. There was also

the horror of not being chosen in gym.

It is conceivable that learning intricately

how to butcher an entire hog

and render every morsel might give one

a feeling of mastery one lacked in childhood.

It is the greatest immaturity to believe suffering

entitles you to something someone wiser

and grayer than I once said.

But in those basements and carpools and

playgrounds as I assassinated one by one

clandestinely my torturers

abandoning their foul normal

bodies to compost the astonishing

tedium of the wending suburban lanes,

I was transubstantiating to supernal

fame and beauty and such eerie genius

that entire books were written about my

books. In fact it takes a long time to realize

your suffering is of very little consequence

to anyone but you. And by that time the future

is already happening and you're pickling okra

and starfruit and foraging for morels in urban forests

and suspending artisan mozzarella in little wet nets

and crafting small-batch, nitrite-free data

and maybe even thinking about having

children, which you swore in a million

billion years you would never do.