Of all the things I’ve tried to do

I was probably worst at selling weed — 

robbed weekly, used too much

of my own product, cut each bag

with a dash of oregano — 

but then I have to consider that summer

Matty asked me to help him boost cars,

his dad called me a liability — 

too paranoid to be lookout,

too shaky to use the slim jim,

didn’t even know how to drive stick — 

oh yeah, & let’s not forget

that time Mo almost lost an arm

after I convinced him to pay me

twenty bucks to stitch his wound

with fishing line instead of going

to the hospital, or that time

I convinced Aliyah to let me

tattoo a cross on her ankle

with a safety pin & a ballpoint — 

& then there’s that time I swiped

a Stentor from Carl Magee’s locker

& tried to set myself straight

by becoming a violinist,

but of course, the noise complaints,

the neighbors banging the portraits

off the walls, the boys talking shit,

calling me prodigy, fancy chink — 

& I wonder if they’re still having

a good laugh, like when they found out

I wanted to be a poet & so they glued

roses & violets to the hood of my Kia,

& so maybe I wanted, for the first time,

to prove them wrong, prove

I didn’t belong there,

& so maybe I made new friends — 

friends who wrote poems,

who sat around talking about poems,

who went to school to study poems

and lived in off-campus apartments

where I crashed on nights

I got too fucked up on white boy drugs

to drive back to the Eastside,

where, even without me, the rosin glow

of junkers trace the block, where Mandy,

three years sober, tucks the kids

into bed, where Lee,

first in his class, spray-paints

the fleet of stolen bikes gold,

where Andrew stands in the kitchen

reading the Bible in the dim light

from the microwave, where Nikki,

years later, coming home

after a double at Champps, calls

to wish me a happy birthday,

& I am, of course, too busy

to answer — somewhere in a different time

zone, at a swanky party celebrating a man

I do not know, who just won an award

for a book I have not read

& the woman who smells of citrus,

who’s been raving to me all night

about how much she admires my work,

excuses herself to use the bathroom,

leaving, in the seat beside me, her open purse.