Compared to What?
How do you know if you’re good?
A group of us gets together every week
In the basements of run-down churches
To anonymously discuss this.
We drink coffee and someone always brings donuts
And everyone seems to have a cigarette except me.
The question hangs in front of us
Half shrouded in the plume of gray smoke
That doesn’t have anywhere else to go.
There’s no choice but to try to answer.
I go first—
My name is Jeff P. and this is everything I’ve done
Good and bad and the things that could go either way
Or are yet to be determined
And it’s all true and unvarnished
Spilling out of me in stream of consciousness
Narrative that doesn't really empty into
A vast ocean of meaning but just sort
Of peters out into a stagnant backyard sinkhole.
Mostly it’s the bad stuff because
That’s all I really remember
(Who remembers all the good stuff
Anyway? What are you, a narcissist?)
The good stuff I do recall seems so trite and mediocre
Like the one time I remembered
A janitor’s name, Cyrus, who
Says hello to me every morning
Or teaching my kid how to tie his shoes.
A lot of the good stuff is things like that
And I don’t want to bore everyone to death.
Everyone prefers a juicy story of tragedy and self-
Inflicted heartbreak, rampant with pointless plot twists
That always lead back to the same place
We all seem to share.
To be fair, statistical analysis would reveal
These tales of woe are probably outliers
And can be excluded from the main data set.
But that’s not the way it works down here
My standard deviation is just wide enough
To get me exiled to this godforsaken place.
When I finish, someone else begins to speak.
It’s gut punch after gut punch
You hear some really horrific stories
Down in the bowels of holy sanctuaries.
None of them make any holistic sense
You keep waiting for denouement
But suddenly a new character appears
Halfway through Act IV and now
We have to find out what happens to her.
Whenever someone finishes rambling
We’re all supposed to cast a vote
Yes or no written on a folded scrap of paper.
Everyone takes a turn.
At the end of the meeting the chairperson
Goes around and collects our votes
And places them in a plastic Halloween pumpkin.
Then she stands at the front of the room
And reads them one by one:
Yes
No
Yes
Yes
No
Blank
No
Yes
Blank
Blank
Blank
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