When I grow up, I want a nose like a potato with gin blossoms aglow. When I’m a big boy, I want knee replacements, because I’m on the obsolescence plan and it shows.

They call it adulting.

I’ll only be auditing.

Sweet sixteen come and go, plans are being made for me. I have plans of my own, sir. I’m a dog with a boner. Sweet sixteen come and gone; shout, twitch and bleed for me while I scratch, moan and yawn.

Get ready for spiritual contortions, late term abortions, licking the icing from the beater, confronting a whore and a cheater.

When I get my diploma, I’ll run in spirals for my life, on the feedback loops of poops and cops… stopping only to start a fight and call myself a patriot. From the scars and bars of my professional flops, prick, trick and thief- with the bones in the family plot, I’ll spell out my progeny’s grief.

When I’m 22, I’ll sniff glue. I’ll incoherently breed in a year or two.

When I’m 35 I’ll habitually drink and drive. The talk shows are calling this a ‘failure to thrive’.

When I reach seven foot tall I’ll find someone to dash me to dots and I’ll roll my eternal sadness into Gordian knots. I’ll spend my youth jamming it into a time capsule set to detonate on my sixtieth annual.

They call it responsibility.

Misery in annuities.

When I’m a man, I’ll break my hands knocking that which can’t be rend out the way and into shape. As a mature Kentucky Kernel, I’ll never be savvy as any random ape but more infernal.

When I grow up, I want to be permanently bent within an electromagnetic grid that’s one tight fit. I’ll arrange my scrambled life’s descent into interrupted shifts— the endless bullshit collecting round me in suffocating drifts.

Where’s that shadow I call my soul?

At the bottom of a very tidy bowl.

When I’m sixty four, I’ll be a broken whore seeping into the floor begging for a just a tad bit more. More time. More wine. More hours to dine.

How’s that? Whosit? Whatsit? It’s the tainted, tattered glory; your granddaddy bled the Potomac for it. Dubye Tea Eff is the memento mori, o pointless statelessman, ye spiritually bereft. Join the ranks, I’ve been told- there’s safety there in the numbers: one zed one zed until only one is left. He’ll get his burger, she’s having her ham and I got us a table at the garbage can.

And, this, my frenemies, is truly what it means to be a groan ass man.