Just Leisure Enough

Was reading another one of those poems that triggers this in me, this filthy resentment I want to rid myself of – – against those who have breakfast at a patio table near the beach, eating croissants and thinking about how deep a Pacific trench is or how the universe is infinite and expanding and the concept of what a trillion dollars might mean, because leisure equals enough space in the mind to ponder things other than how you will pay rent next month when the money runs out since you left the warehouse job at Amazon because of the injury you incurred at work that they say is not work related and how you can’t afford the cigarettes you use to try to soothe, but then feel guilty about, as if the guilt of poverty and all that it implies, or rather, is evidence of, about you is not enough, and I wish this indignation would fly away into the sky like Bezos, left over from when I discovered, or rather, was misinformed, that because my parents had nothing but a shack in a bad neighborhood and a couple of old cars that I never could go to college from my eighth grade guidance counselor who took twenty minutes before he could beat me down, telling me about how there were different types of people in the world, and who had how much and who didn’t have any, that I found to be irrelevant to what I was asking – – what are the best schools of journalism in the nation and do I have to take biology in high school to get into them – – my only two questions that I kept reasserting over and over after dutifully waiting for him to complete, like a good girl, which I was, since I had learned from birth my mother did not love me and I would do anything I could for almost the rest of my life to try to be enough that she would, when I wasn’t defiantly going in entirely the other direction, but he didn’t look up my grades to see all those As nor ask if I was breaking the high school track record for the high jump in my first year of middle school or the state record for the 50-yard dash the year after in gym classes to see how high I would jump or how fast I would run to get out of my neighborhood and the life that came with it since you couldn’t get in a rocket ship from there or sit at a patio table smelling salted air but maybe take orders from those who could, if you managed to fake middle-class enough to get hired since otherwise you might make the customers feel uncomfortable while they were trying to enjoy sumptuousness and discuss philosophical right-brained subjects, and count up the dollars they left on the table and tell yourself you should be grateful for what you have – – so I could manage stillness enough to gaze up and conjecture loftiness and deactivate the neural pathways cast deep and olden as the ocean that cause one’s mind to even come up with the thoughts to begrudge a poem of such loveliness.


Originally published by Eastern Iowa Review.

Photo credit: Ranney Campbell, 2024.