Of all the things I’ve tried to do

Lyrics

I was probably worst at selling weed — robbed weekly, used too much of my own product, cut each bag with a dash of oregano — but then I have to consider that summer Matty asked me to help him boost cars, his dad called me a liability — too paranoid to be lookout, too shaky to use the slim jim, didn't even know how to drive stick — oh yeah, & let's not forget that time Mo almost lost an arm after I convinced him to pay me twenty bucks to stitch his wound with fishing line instead of going to the hospital, or that time I convinced Aliyah to let me tattoo a cross on her ankle with a safety pin & a ballpoint — & then there's that time I swiped a Stentor from Carl Magee's locker & tried to set myself straight by becoming a violinist, but of course, the noise complaints, the neighbors banging the portraits off the walls, the boys talking shit, calling me prodigy, fancy chink — & I wonder if they're still having a good laugh, like when they found out I wanted to be a poet & so they glued roses & violets to the hood of my Kia, & so maybe I wanted, for the first time, to prove them wrong, prove I didn't belong there, & so maybe I made new friends — friends who wrote poems, who sat around talking about poems, who went to school to study poems and lived in off-campus apartments where I crashed on nights I got too fucked up on white boy drugs to drive back to the Eastside, where, even without me, the rosin glow of junkers trace the block, where Mandy, three years sober, tucks the kids into bed, where Lee, first in his class, spray-paints the fleet of stolen bikes gold, where Andrew stands in the kitchen reading the Bible in the dim light from the microwave, where Nikki, years later, coming home after a double at Champps, calls to wish me a happy birthday, & I am, of course, too busy to answer — somewhere in a different time zone, at a swanky party celebrating a man I do not know, who just won an award for a book I have not read & the woman who smells of citrus, who's been raving to me all night about how much she admires my work, excuses herself to use the bathroom, leaving, in the seat beside me, her open purse.