1.
every decade’s so weird, you know what I mean?
like, we were watching some television program the other day on one of the channels that come with the little satellite thing that you have to stick out the window to get a good signal or else everything goes fuzzy and makes white noise
because we can’t afford cable anymore, or even a decent radio,
and the lady in the television show said, “In the ‘70s, the clothes got tighter and the hair got bigger”
and it’s so trippy to think that the ‘70s weren’t always the ‘70s
at some point, they were in the future and today or a couple of numbers in the dates of a letter a man wrote to his lover in Vienna
and someday, we’ll just be a decade too, a string of years in a millennium no one can relate to anymore
the 1880s were once the ‘80s too

2.
or like when you’re out with your parents at a diner with a television hooked up onto the wall
and your mother says something dumb like “Wow, Susan Sarandon got so old”
or “Harrison Ford has really aged, hasn’t he?”
like, what are people like Susan Sarandon and Harrison Ford supposed to do?
are they not supposed to live through the decades?
3.

you took off your glasses and pulled the rubber band out of your hair and sighed
eras are dumb, you said, because they’re characterized by the majority
and you still play the Nirvana album you got for your thirteenth birthday every night before you go to sleep, like that makes any difference to anybody
and you so want to be like the sweater the boy who sits in front of you in math class wears, the purple one that says “I Am Other” on the back in Crayola colors
nobody ever cares about the minorities, you said,
and you added that you didn’t mean only in terms of race because there are minorities of all kinds and they’re all ignored in the same way
because if the world is really your oyster, like the saying goes, there’s only one and everyone is trying to crack the shell first,
but you’re just a minnow, my dear, and you couldn’t imagine being anything else

4.
you are poetry, but your lines are all about the same tragedies
can’t you see yourself five years from now, wearing handpicked flowers in your soft hair and strumming an acoustic guitar on the corner of Greenwich and Chambers,
singing about teen angst even though you’re no longer a teen?
you’ll write melodies about how you don’t understand the youngsters these days
with their updated slang words and emphasis on things you never thought twice about in your day --
your day?
it was mine too
why do we love to dwell on decades?
it will be a matter of time before you realize there should be and are ways to live without ever going back