Why

The mirror in my room is meanest after midnight.
In daylight it is only glass, cheap and square and nailed a little crooked to the wall.
By day it gives me hair that will not listen, a shirt that fits wrong in the shoulders,
a face I know well enough to ignore.

Then night comes on and the whole room changes sides.
The lamp throws one yellow patch over the dresser.
The posters look half-alive.
The window turns black and gives nothing back.
My records lean in their stack like witnesses.
The mirror gets sharp.

I stand there longer than any sane person should,
pulling at my shirt, pushing my hair back,
trying out three different versions of the same expression
like maybe somewhere under my own face
there is a better one waiting to be found.

Older.
Harder.
Less easy to read.
The kind of face that would not get laughed at.
The kind of face girls would remember later.
The kind of face that looked like it had already survived something worth writing down.

Instead I get my own plain self
with a jaw not set enough,
eyes too quick to show whatever they are thinking,
and that one stupid look I get
when I am trying not to look like I care.

The bad part is I care about all of it.
The hair.
The shirt.
The angle of my mouth.
Whether I look weak.
Whether I look young.
Whether I look like I belong inside my own skin
or like I borrowed it from some better-built guy who came back for it.

I used to think growing up meant one day waking up
and feeling finished.
I thought there would be a morning
when I would walk past a mirror
and not stop.

That has not happened.

Some nights I think the mirror is lying.
Some nights I think it is the only thing in the room
that tells the whole ugly truth.
And some nights, the worst kind,
I think both can be true
and that is why I stand there so long
looking like a person
waiting to be introduced
to himself.

I played the same song four times in a row
and called it thinking.

The tape hissed a little before the drums came in.
I liked that part.
It sounded like weather trying to get through the walls.
Then the singer came on full of hurt and swagger
like he had been born in tight black jeans
with one hand already reaching for trouble.

I sat on the floor with my back against the bed
and let the whole thing hit again.
The same line.
The same guitar.
The same chorus acting like pain could be made noble
if it was loud enough.

Maybe that is why I kept playing it.
Not for the song.
For permission.

There are nights when a person does not want comfort.
He wants company that sounds worse than he feels
so he can point at it in the dark and think
at least I am not the only fool making a cathedral out of this.

The tape turned and clicked.
I hit rewind.
That hard, fast whir
sounded almost better than the song itself,
like time going backward in a little black machine,
like somebody had built a way
to take a ruined three minutes
and make it happen again on purpose.

I think I understood then,
without saying it right,
that some people keep hurting a thing
by replaying it.
Not to heal it.
Not to solve it.
Just to hear the shape of it one more time
and prove it happened exactly the way it felt.

That was me on the carpet,
one hand on the player,
staring at the dark window
like somebody in a bad music video,
letting a song I did not write
say everything I was too proud to say out loud.

I keep writing things
I would not say.

That must mean one of two things.
Either the page is brave
or I am a coward.

Maybe both.

When I talk,
I edit too fast.
I hear the room in my head.
I hear the answer coming back.
I hear how foolish I might sound
and the mouth closes up.

The page does not laugh.
The page does not nod either,
which is its own hard kind of honesty.

I am beginning to think
writing is not a cleaner form of speech.
It is dirtier.
It keeps more blood in it.

She passed me in the hallway
with books held up against her side,
and nothing happened.
No choir.
No great bell.
No bright mark split across the day.

Only this
I forgot what I was thinking
for half a second,
which is more power
than most people ever get over another.

I wish I had some noble line
to pin the whole thing down.
I do not.
She walked by.
I watched.
The floor kept being floor.
The lockers kept their stupid green.
The bell rang on.

Yet all that afternoon
the day had a shifted feeling,
like a picture hung straight
in the morning
that somebody had nudged crooked by noon.

When I was small I thought by now
I’d know most everything somehow.
I thought that older meant less doubt,
More answers in and fewer out.

I thought I’d wake one day and feel
Solid and finished, hard and real,
Like all the grown-ups in the room
Who never seemed to drift or bloom
Into ten different kinds of thought
From things they wished and things they ought.

Instead I know some larger words
And hear some sadder kinds of birds.
I keep more to myself these days.
I look at people’s hidden ways.
I think too much.
I talk less fast.
I wish some hours would hurry past.

If this is growing, then I guess
It’s partly more and partly less.

When the late bus came
everything looked different.
Same school,
same brick,
same flagpole,
same gym doors shut,
but emptier in a way
that made it seem
I’d stayed behind
after the day had been taken up.

A janitor rolled a mop bucket
down one hall.
Some girl laughed somewhere
I could not see.
Locker doors banged once,
then once again,
then not at all.

I sat by the window on the ride home.
Town went by in pieces.
Drugstore.
Bank.
The lot with junked cars.
A dog under a porch.
A field with three rolls of hay.

I remember thinking
it was possible to belong to a place
and still feel
just off from it
by one inch.

It was too hot for the jacket.
Everybody knew it.
I knew it when I pulled it on.
I knew it when the lining stuck to my arms
before I even got out the door.
I knew it halfway down Main Street
with the sun hitting the parked cars so hard
the whole block looked angry.

I wore it anyway.

That is the sort of decision
that makes complete sense at seventeen
and none at all past that.

The jacket was black and a little too big,
secondhand,
one zipper gone stiff,
one cuff rough where the fake leather had cracked.
It smelled like closet dust and old smoke and somebody else’s cologne
that had no business hanging on that long.

I loved it.

I loved what it asked of me.
Stand different.
Walk slower.
Do not grin too easily.
Keep your shoulders set.
Do not let anybody think they can get the whole story
just by looking once.

Under it I was sweating through my shirt
and trying not to show it.
That seemed nearly perfect.
The whole age felt like that.
Trying to look dangerous
while quietly dying of the weather.

A girl I knew from school
passed in her friend’s car and laughed when she saw me.
Not mean.
Worse.
Like she knew exactly what I was doing
and found it almost sweet.

I wanted to vanish.
I wanted to look cooler.
I wanted, for one clean second,
to become the person the jacket promised.

Instead I kept walking
through all that heavy summer heat
wearing my ridiculous black armor
like a boy who thought style might save him
from being seen too plain.

Maybe it did, a little.
Maybe it made me look foolish.
Maybe those are closer than people admit.

I wrote a letter just to see
If words looked truer when set free
On paper rather than the head
Where half of everything feels dead
Before it ever reaches sound.

I wrote it slow.
I crossed lines out.
I put in things I meant at first
Then took them back for fear or doubt.

I said too much.
I said too little.
I sounded plain.
I sounded false.
I tried to keep my heart from showing
Then wrote straight through it, all at once.

The stamp sat ready on the desk.
The envelope was neat and shut.
I held the thing for half a week
Then tore it cleanly through the middle.

Some truths are hard enough to have.
Harder still to hand to someone else.

I wrote a love poem once
to no one.

Not a real girl.
Not somebody in algebra.
Not the one from the rink,
or the one with the red scarf,
or the one who smiled at me in line and ruined two days.
No.
This was worse.

It was for the whole idea of being wanted
in that perfect feverish way
songs had taught me to expect.

I wrote about eyes I had not seen,
hands I had not held,
some invented midnight where the air was just right
and the whole world had the decency
to shut up and let two people mean it.
I wrote like my life depended on a girl
who did not exist outside the page.

The poem was terrible.
Earnest as a knife wound.
Full of moonlight and forever
and all the giant words young people use
when they have only brushed the edge of a thing
and want credit for drowning.

I knew it was bad even then.
That did not stop me.
I think bad poems are part of the toll.
You write your way through a swamp of them
hoping one day to come out somewhere honest.

What embarrasses me now
is not the poem.
It is how badly I wanted it to be true.
Not the girl.
The feeling.
That clean dramatic collision
where somebody sees the whole wreck of you
and not only stays
but steps closer.

I had not learned yet
that love is not usually written in one bright streak
across the sky.
Most times it comes in looking smaller,
less dressed up,
and you miss it
while waiting for the orchestra.

Still, I kept the poem a while.
Folded in the back of a notebook.
Proof that I had once been ridiculous enough
to believe a blank page
might call somebody into being.

There are evenings when the mirror
looks like plain glass.

There are evenings when it looks
like an accusation.

Same face,
same eyes,
same bad hair doing what it does,
same shoulders not broad enough yet
for half the things I want from life,
same mouth better built for silence
than speeches.

Yet the mirror changes.
Or I do.

A person spends years growing
into a face
while pretending he already lives there.
That may be the whole trouble
with being young.
You are introduced to yourself
far earlier
than you are ready to meet.

There were nights my room felt more like me
than I did.

The radio low on the dresser.
The dial glowing.
The DJ talking like he knew secret roads out of town.
A stack of school books pretending to matter.
A heap of clothes in the chair.
Ticket stub in the drawer.
Two bad poems folded in a notebook.
A glass with three inches of flat soda going warm.
The window cracked open to let summer in
and hear cars fade up the hill.

I would lie there staring at the ceiling
waiting for the next song
like it might arrive carrying instructions.

That seems funny now.
Then it felt real enough to bet your pulse on.

A slow song could ruin me for an hour.
A hard one with enough drums in it
could make me believe I was one decent haircut
away from becoming the exact person I needed.
Every voice on the radio sounded older than mine.
Every song knew the road before I had even left the driveway.

The dark made promises.
The dark lied plenty.
I trusted it anyway.

I think that room saved me some.
Not in a grand, movie kind of way.
In the plain kind.
A door that shut.
A place to go strange in private.
A place to be dramatic without witnesses.
A place where a notebook could take the hit
for feelings too embarrassing to wear to breakfast.

People talk like teenage rooms are junk piles.
Mine was a country.
Messy, loud, half-invented, full of bad laws and secret religion,
but mine.
The radio was its moon.

At nineteen I was convinced
everything mattered more than it does
and less than it should.

That is not wise.
It is just accurate.

A call not returned
could black out a day.
A song heard in the right car
with the right weather on the windshield
could make me think I had found the whole secret of being alive.
A line in a book
could feel carved for me alone.
One look from a girl
could build a kingdom
or burn one down
and either way I would have written three pages about it
before breakfast the next morning.

I had a talent for enlarging things.
A gift, you might say,
if you were kind enough to ignore the damage.
I could turn waiting into doom,
a kiss into prophecy,
a bad week into personal mythology.
There were days I went around with my own pulse
like a soundtrack.

What I did not know then
was how much of youth is costume jewelry and real blood
worn at the same time.
The feelings are true.
The speeches around them are often borrowed.
You live inside both.
That is why so much of it sounds grand and foolish together.

I do not hate that boy.
He was overlit, overmusical, overhurt, overready for disaster,
and he thought half his life was happening in perfect slow motion.
He was wrong about plenty.
He was not wrong to feel huge.

You are only that breakable once.
Only that loud inside your own head.
Only that certain the next song,
the next town,
the next love,
the next version of yourself
is waiting just past the edge of the parking lot
with the engine running.

I ought to be doing something useful.
That is what study hall is for.
Pages, facts, dates, numbers,
all the good, proper things
that are meant to stack up
into a future.

Instead I am watching dust move
through the stripe of light
by the far window
and thinking how strange it is
that a person can feel busy in the head
and still be doing nothing anybody would count.

The girl in front of me chews her pencil.
Two boys keep passing a folded note.
Somebody coughs.
A chair drags.
The clock keeps making its one small argument.

I write my name three times
then make the letters larger,
then turn the R into something better
than an R has any need to be.

Maybe this is wasting time.
Maybe this is how a person
begins to notice
what kind of life
he might want.

The tree behind our house in fall
Looked thin enough to break.
By June it was a wall of leaves.
By now it seemed half fake.

The branches showed their awkward bones.
The wind could pass right through.
It looked like something left behind
When summer up and flew.

I used to think bare trees were dead
Or close enough to be.
Now I just think they’re telling truths
That leaves would never tell me.

A thing can stand through colder days
And not be less alive.
It only looks more plain and hard
When all the green has died.

In winter Patches scratched the door
As if we’d left him out by war.
Not once.
Not twice.
But all night long
With steady claw and cat complaint,
a rough small song.

Then in he’d come,
all cold and grand,
and sniff the room like he had planned
to stay outside forever,
but changed his mind
for our sake.

He’d walk around as if he owned
the rug, the chair, the leg, the phone,
then choose the warmest place in sight
and sleep like kings do, wrong or right.

By morning he’d be crying out
To go right back and roam about.
I used to think that made no sense.
Now I think maybe it does.

Patches did not jump as high
That year.
He still came when food hit the dish,
still rubbed against the porch rail,
still looked offended by almost everything,
but slower.

I saw it first when he missed the chair.
Not by much.
Just enough
to make me feel something low and mean
turn over in me.

Cats are supposed to stay cats.
That is one of the dumb rules
kids make without saying out loud.
Porches stay.
Trees stay.
Summer comes back.
Cats stay cats.

He climbed up the second time
and sat down as if nothing had happened.
I acted like nothing had happened too.
That was the deal.

But I watched him more after that.

There is something filthy and sad
about waiting near a pay phone
and pretending you are not waiting.

The phone booth by the drugstore
had initials carved in the metal,
gum wrappers down by the base,
a cracked little shelf for your change,
and a smell like hot wire, dirt, and rain dried on concrete.

I stood near it half the evening
with one quarter in my pocket
that felt heavier every minute.

I was not sure if I wanted the phone to ring
or to stay dead forever.
Those are not opposite wishes
when you are young enough
to believe one voice can wreck a week.

Cars went by.
The red light changed.
Some little kid came out of the five-and-dime
dragging a balloon by its string
like life was simple and bright and perfectly built for him.
A truckload of older boys laughed too loud.
A woman in curlers crossed the lot carrying milk.
The sky darkened in layers.

The phone did not ring.

I put my hand in my pocket and touched the quarter again
like it was a plan I had not agreed to.
Call and sound eager.
Do not call and sound proud.
Neither one looked good.
Both looked exactly like me.

In songs, waiting gets dressed up.
It gets neon and thunder and perfect last lines.
In real life it is mostly standing around
trying to look like you just happen to be there
when your whole body has turned into one long nerve.

I never made the call.
That ought to sound strong.
It does not.
I walked home with the quarter still in my jeans
feeling equal parts noble, stupid, and empty,
which was a combination I was getting to know pretty well.

I knelt
when everyone else knelt.
I bowed my head
when everyone else bowed.

I knew the words by sound,
by order,
by years of hearing them
fall over a room
till the room itself felt shaped by them.

Yet there were nights
I did not know
whether I was speaking upward
or inward
or nowhere.

That scared me some.
It made me feel older
than I wanted.

I think doubt enters quiet.
Not with thunder.
Not with wicked laughter.
It slips in
while somebody is coughing two pews back
and the heat comes on
and the stained glass looks dark
from outside the church.

I did not stop believing.
I stopped believing belief was simple.

Rain on Main Street after dark
made the whole town look better than it was.

That sounds cruel.
It is not.
It is just true.

The cracked sidewalks went black and shining.
The drugstore sign bled red into the puddles.
The barber pole looked almost beautiful.
The courthouse windows turned soft.
Even the boarded place by the alley
got one good minute
where the rain laid a skin of light over its broken face
and made it seem like a place you could forgive.

I walked with my jacket open
and let the rain hit through my shirt.
There are ages when that feels noble.
Eighteen is one of them.

I had just had some little heartbreak
or some almost-heartbreak
or some drama I was calling heartbreak
to give it a richer sound.
I do not laugh at that now.
Small pain is huge pain
when you have not had the larger sizes yet.

The whole town looked like a song
trying not to admit it was a town.
I liked that.
I liked the lie and the truth of it together.
Same closed shops.
Same gossip stuck in every diner booth.
Same roads leading out and then back in.
Yet under rain and neon
it could pretend a little.
And I could too.

I think that is what I loved about night then.
It did not change things.
It made room for them to look like more.

Take River Road past the mill,
past the ditch and broken rail,
past the field gone brown and flat,
past the houses worn and pale,
and there’s a bend where evening comes
earlier than the rest of town,
as if the day gets tired there
and sets its heavy bucket down.

I used to ride that road with friends,
all noise and jokes and half-known plans,
heels on the dash, bad singing, smoke
from somebody else’s older hands.

Yet once I went there by myself
near dusk in late October light,
and every tree stood stripped and dark
and made the whole road think of night.

I do not know what I went looking for.
I only knew I had to go.
Some roads begin as roads, then turn
into the place your mind will show
itself more plain than rooms can do.
That bend was one of those for me.
A person can be seventeen
and feel both trapped and almost free.

Saturday night in the parking lot behind the grocery
felt bigger than it really was.
A few cars.
A boom box with weak batteries.
Cigarette tips flashing in the dark.
Laughter bouncing off cinder block.
The whole cheap kingdom made of tail lights, denim, hair spray, and nerve.

We leaned on hoods like we owned the world
or had at least taken out a short lease on it
till midnight.

Everybody talked louder than needed.
That is part of it.
Every joke had to travel.
Every story had to act like history.
Every heartbreak had to sound fatal
or it did not count.

Somebody always had a bottle hidden somewhere.
Somebody always knew who liked who,
who got dumped,
who got caught,
who was sneaking out,
who was lying,
who was already halfway gone from this town
in their own head.

The girls looked impossible in the lot lights.
The boys looked tough till they laughed wrong.
The music came and went with static.
A train passed once in the distance
and made everybody shut up for one breath,
like the dark itself had shifted gears.

I loved those nights.
I hated them.
That is the right way to say it.
I loved being near the center of things.
I hated how fast the center moved.
One minute you were in the joke,
in the circle,
lit up by your own clever mouth.
The next minute you were one step outside it
with your hands in your pockets
trying to act like you had chosen that spot.

Then the night would end all at once.
Cars starting.
Doors slamming.
One pair peeling off together.
One friend too drunk to say much.
One song cut short in the middle.

And the parking lot would go back to being only blacktop,
trash by the curb,
oil marks,
faded white lines,
nothing holy,
nothing grand.

That change got me every time.
How a place could hold all that noise,
all that wanting,
all that posing and praying and almost-touching,
then by one in the morning look like it had never meant a thing.

They told me to smile
like this was simple.

Tilt your head a little.
Not too much.
Shoulders down.
Chin up.
Try not to look stiff.
Try not to look fake.
Try not to blink.
Try to look like yourself,
only better.

That may be the whole joke
of senior pictures.
A final official lie
where you are expected to look cheerful, finished, fit for framing,
right while your insides are split clean down the middle
between get me out of here
and do not make me leave.

I put on the shirt.
I combed my hair.
I gave the camera something close enough to a smile
that nobody complained.

Yet the whole time I kept thinking
this is not me.
Not the full one.
Not the one who drives too far at night.
Not the one who writes bad poems in the margins of history notes.
Not the one who gets mean in the mirror.
Not the one who wants more from life
than he can name without sounding foolish.
Not the one who is scared of leaving town
and scared of staying till his face sets into place here forever.

The camera got a version.
A useful one.
Mothers like it.
Yearbooks can handle it.
Future people will point and say
there he is.

No.
There is one second of me
wearing a borrowed expression
while a flashbulb turned my confusion into proof.

The field in September had two colors
yellow where summer held on,
brown where it had quit.

That seemed true to me
in more ways than one.

School had started.
The mornings had a sharper feel.
Crickets kept on going
as if nothing had changed,
which was almost insulting.

Everybody talked of football,
tests, girls, weather, plans,
all the ordinary machinery
used to drag a year along.

I walked home slow that month.
I do not know why.
Perhaps I liked the season best
when it could not decide.
Perhaps I was the same.

By seven the stores were nearly done,
the sidewalks thinning one by one,
the barber pole no longer bright,
the drugstore windows full of night.

A truck went by. A dog barked twice.
The air had that clear evening bite
that made the whole town seem held back
between the dark and leftover light.

I used to think small towns were dull,
too slow, too known, too full of faces
that had seen yours since you were small
and kept old versions in their places.

Now I think dull is not the word.
A town can look asleep and keep
more stories under one main street
than city people ever meet.

The streetlight came on before dark
As if it knew something I did not.
The evening was not gone yet,
only dimming around the edges,
yet there it was,
that yellow globe
buzzing over the road
like a warning
or a promise
or a tired eye refusing sleep.

I stood in the yard longer than needed
watching moths throw themselves near it,
small pale things
too faithful to one brightness.

I thought then
that people might be built that way too.

My Sunday suit had stiff new pants
And shoes that always shined too much.
The collar scratched. The sleeves felt wrong.
The whole thing made me watch my hands.

Church clothes ask a lot of you.
Sit straight.
Walk right.
Keep still.
Do not tear this.
Do not stain that.
Do not become the boy
who slides down a dirt bank
after service
and comes home looking honest.

Still, when I saw myself in the mirror
all combed and buttoned up,
I half liked it.
Not the suit.
The idea
that a person might be made better
for a little while
by trying to look it.

I saw a girl at the skating rink
and that is the whole trouble.

Not that she spoke to me.
Not that I spoke to her.
Not that anything happened
worth putting in a grown-up story.

She just went by once
with her hair coming loose
and one hand brushing it back
and her laugh already turned away
before I could hear the end of it.

That was enough.

Then for an hour
I forgot how arms work,
how standing works,
how a person who has had a body
all his life
can suddenly seem misplaced in it.

If I rhyme this
it will sound foolish.
If I do not
it still will.

She never knew.
That makes it cleaner, maybe.
Still, all week
I kept hearing wheels on wood
and seeing that half-second
like something dropped in me
that kept rolling.

After the funeral
the house felt wrong.

Not haunted.
That would have been simpler.

Only wrong
in the way cups on the table
and coats over chairs
and dishes in the sink
can keep doing their plain jobs
when one person is gone
and the room knows it.

People spoke softly
for a while,
which almost made it worse.
Forks touched plates.
Water ran.
Somebody asked who wanted tea.

I remember standing in the kitchen
looking out the window
thinking the whole world
ought to have paused one hour more.
Not forever.
One hour would have been enough
to let the truth sit down.

The field in winter was all stubble,
brown and cut down, low and plain.
No big speech in it.
No red barn picture look.
Just frozen ground,
a ditch gone hard,
weeds with frost on them,
and fence posts leaning like old men
who knew a good bit and said less.

I liked it better than summer sometimes.
Summer tries too much.
Winter lets things stand there
and take the weather.

A crow crossed over it
black and slow.
That was enough to make the whole field
look made on purpose.

My notebook fills in winter fast.
The pages seem to take ink better
when trees are bare
and fields look blunt
and every road is bordered up
by dead grass, ditchwater, fence, and weather.

In summer I go out more.
In winter I stay in
and words begin to act important.
Some are good words.
Some are only words pretending.
I cannot always tell.

I write down things I mean that night
and read them back next morning
as if some moody stranger
borrowed my hand.

That bothers me.
It pleases me too.