Is There a Point Where Not Keeping Up Well Enough Will Make Me a Gen-Xer?
—Mark Danowsky, Facebook post
We were born old, our mysteries wrapped in burlap:
scratchy, dry. We hadn’t discovered our music,
grew it in us—whiny, sad, quick to rage,
frustrated, strange. Required to survive
in pretend joyous glitz of the 80s, classic nothing of the 70s,
we were a class preparing ourselves for pointlessness.
While our parents busied diversifying assets,
we sought the other. We ran out of band names &
had to build new ones from what moved us.
Not our fashion sense. Not our grandparents’ drugstore cologne
that smelled like a night at the bar. Wars past & wars to come?
We hated them & forgot the promised annihilation—
we carried it as long as we could, then put our headphones on.
Ace Boggess is author of five books of poetry—Misadventure, I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, Ultra Deep Field, The Prisoners, and The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled—as well the novels States of Mercy and A Song Without a Melody. His writing appears in Notre Dame Review, The Laurel Review, River Styx, Rhino, North Dakota Quarterly, and other journals. He received a fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts and spent five years in a West Virginia prison. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.