You were a son-of-a-bitch of a year.
You were the Celtics losing in overtime,
a dirty play by Kurt Rambis.
You were the Red Sox' Bill Buckner
missing that simple grounder.
You were the gas lines of the '70s.
You were worse than Tom Petty
duetting with Stevie Nicks.
You made Stalin seem charming.
You were just plain ugly.

You sank my Battleship, you stole my treasure,
you left me with a flat tire and no spare
thirteen miles from the nearest garage.
You were an unlucky number, a shattered mirror,
a step on a crack that broke my back.
You were the Scottish play, you were toil and trouble,
you were calamity, a song by Morrissey,
you were a morning sick as the day of doom,
you were a surly drunk.

I got kicked out of college
for threatening my dolt of a roommate.
It was the last time I saw Leah.
My parents split up. The big guy
kept company with a racist shrew from Jersey.
I worked and I drank and I saw movies with Bragdon.
I turned twenty-one and did nothing for my birthday.
I began to show signs of bad mental health.
I lived in East Boston on the noisiest street.
That hellshrike of a neighbour
screaming abuse at her kids.
I published atrocious poems in Mudfish.

I got into fights with Catholics.
I became Catholic. I worked in Brookline.
I quit my job in Brookline.
I still loved Leah, madly, passionately,
I would never see her again. No matter.
I told myself I'd apply
to Fordham, to Dartmouth, to Bard.
Then I thought the better of it.
The monks of Spencer wouldn't take me.
They said, go back to college.
I listened to right-wing talk-radio.
I read Bill Buckley, and loved the haughty syllables.
I read Miss Moore, and loved her peaceful wisdom,
I who was neither peaceful nor wise.

You were peanut butter in the mousetrap,
cyanide in the Tylenol, arsenic in the tap water.
You were bombs over Baghdad,
and swarms of bees in my noggin.
You were 38 degrees and heavy rain.
You were Mesto, stanco, e spirante.
You were "Love Will Tear Us Apart."
Unblooming of the best hope ever sown.
An insult to the brain. All joy quite slain.