My Trouble is My Trouble

It’s midnight and I lay awake in my middle-aged bed

There are a jumble of adolescent thoughts cannonballing around

Inside the temple that is my mind

It has been invaded by a concept so pervasive I cannot escape it

Yesterday, on my favorite radio station,

The morning personality posed a solemn enquiry

Sandwiched in between the alternative rock and jokes

He asked, “what would the sixteen-year-old you punch you in the face for”?

I laughed at first, because I am a badass

I play guitar, for shit sakes, and bass and drums

I paint my nails black like Ozzy, skull rings on my fingers

What could possibly make my younger self punch me in my face

But then, as I sat in traffic, my laughter died in me

Would my younger self, at the height of my youthful rebellion,

See this man that I have become and think the same as I?

Or would he be angered by the existence that I inhabit?

And a burning, nagging, gnawing doubt began to grow inside

And now I am awake when I should be dreaming

Because I know the answer to Woody’s question

I know what my sixteen-year-old self would punch me in the face for!

Of all the things that I have done and become

there is but one sin that I deserve this violence for

It is many things but I think I can sum it up in a single word

It is an over simplification but still I think he would be angered most by…

Compromise!

Now I am not meaning when your wife asks you what you want to watch

And you say, “whatever you want,”

Even then knowing it’s going to be something you hate

That is an act of love, and of sacrifice…a noble sacrifice!

I am not speaking of when you are walking down the frosty streets

And some dumbass says to you, in an annoyingly cheery way,

“MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!” and you want to scream “BAH HUMBUG!”

But you smile and say, “Merry Christmas, dude!”

I am not even opining about sharing our country with others

Others that believe differently than me

And live lives that I cannot understand

That is simply an act of not being…not being a dick!

What I mean is that time, when you were young, and full of truth

And instead of taking your guitar and making it wherever

You took that other stupid job

Because it was “the right thing to do.”

That time when you let yourself talk us out of going

Going somewhere and doing something

And you sat at home and did nothing

because we were scared

That time when that person in your life that you loved

And needed more than the next note in a guitar solo

And you let them go and never told them

Because “you would only make their life a mess”

And all the missed opportunities and missed steps

He would not understand those things

Because I don’t

I don’t