Turning Thirty

Turning Thirty,
In my kitchen, peering out at the snow,
Watching the snowbanks grow.
In thirty years,
What have I learned?

I peer over at the dog my grandpa left behind
His last legacy
Lying on her side
She looks as though she’s waiting to die. (Don’t all geriatrics?)

She’s the dog I lovingly call “the fudge-snacker”
Oh, you find that offensive?
Well, she eats her own shit.
I find that offensive.
She whines, she wobbles, with arthritic hobbles,
Then she vomits up the turds that she gobbles.
The piles look a bit like hamburger
And smell like death.

And as I walk the old bitch,
Still those mouth-breathers say
“Give me a kiss.” (She licks the man’s face.)
“I love dogs.”
“For a boxer, she sure is pretty.”
Right.
She’s pretty ugly, and pretty stupid.
And awfully smelly, whoa Nellie, I tell ye,
She’s ancient
And she grows older still.

The end of life is horrible.
The beginning is pretty bad too.
But that doesn’t stop us from making it a little worse anyway.
(Why not, right? Preparation for the REAL world. But what is the real world? I mean, aside from mindless cowards victimizing the weak? Or is that all we can aspire to?)
Who is the sick fuck that dreamed up circumcision?
I want a name.
So I can piss on his grave,
With my incomplete dick.
I hope he’s rotting in hell now,
With a circumcised face.

I suppose I should be grateful.
I suppose my circumcision was my first birthday present.
And it lasts a lifetime.
Chocolate orange, eat your heart out.
No way I’m doing that to my son.
No way.

Traditions are just like any other life.
They die.
I’m going to watch this one die.
I’m going to make it die.

We all do that, don’t we?
We come up with ways to do a better job than our parents.
Because no matter how hard they tried,
We can do better.
We think we’re so goddamn smart, don’t we?

A mother screams at her eight-year-old son
because he doesn’t know McLeod is pronounced “Muh-Clowd”
She says I didn’t read enough
But you have to learn something before you know it,
And you can’t read sounds.

Year after year, she sent me to camp,
And year after year, I kept telling her not to.
But, as she told me,
“Camp is not a punishment, it’s a privilege.”
Well you could have fooled me.
She tells me about the fun she had at that same camp, thirty years earlier,
And I realize she simply didn’t have the mental capacity
to distinguish between my childhood
and her own.

The kids made fun of my pale skin.
Even the counsellors did.
They said I didn’t tan enough.
But it’s something I could never change.
Believe me, I would have if I could have.
Even my mother made fun.
Something about burning out her retinas when I took off my shirt.
Yeah, right.
I wish.

Now it’s my thirtieth birthday,
And they ask me,
What do you want for your birthday?
And I tell them I just don’t care anymore.

As I look up now at the grey sky,
As the snow descends, forming mounds of cold crap we have to move every day,
But we tell ourselves to keep fighting the good fight,
So we grab our coats, and our shovels
And we trudge outwards
The drudgery
It’s the drudgery that really gets me.

And the dog farts again.
(Fudgery?)
Just no more shit-barf, okay?

Turning Thirty,
And all I’ve got to show for it,
Is this shitty poem.