Two Poems
by Timothy Duffy
1998
Back then your dream was for someone
to kiss you at a party while your friends
watched behind a cooler of Hi-C and vodka.
Or you were the loner, happyish between
books and a journal, a vinyl album
in your hands at the bus stop by the library.
Sadness was a spectrum. Happiness
was hollow. Didn’t all the jocks
dream of taking the glasses off the girl
reading poetry at the edge of the frame?
I remember being on a bus
and it was just the bus with its memorized
pathways. You can do this too and when
you get off and rush toward the corner
and your friends see your face
they’ll think: this will be the face your whole life.
The organs under it will age. Its lines will deepen
and dry, but god, it’s the only face I want.
2001
Everyone was listening to Aaliyah and we thought
to die young was the coolest thing even as we lit
candles and played Are You that Somebody?
on a discman at the park.
Don’t you remember joking about death when
you were young? My boys and I joked about
all the ways to destroy a body—the slow drip
of pleasure while the steering wheel veers off
to the ditch underneath a perfect moon.
Now, it is so boring to die. We decide
to love our lives but in secret.
This shitty millennium broke all its
neon-kitchen-sitcom-set-promises
and made us picture what it must be like
to burn on your way to work, thinking
of everyone to love. Fear feels so good
next to anger. Let’s let some bubblegum
pop blast out from plastic speakers
and pretend the future won’t be worse.
Timothy Duffy’s work has recently appeared in The Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Salt Hill, trampset, and elsewhere. He lives outside of Salt Lake City with his wife and three children and teaches at Utah Valley University. He is also a scholar of Renaissance literature with numerous publications on Renaissance lyric poetry and cartography. His idea of a perfect date is a picnic at a regional Shakespeare in the Park with illicitly packaged cocktails and lots of food packed in mason jars.
Forget Cool 