When I was in high school, Ronald Reagan was President of the United States, but I was too self-absorbed to worry about the damage he was doing to the American people with his policies and agenda. Instead, like all teenagers, I was focused on, among other things, ogling the perfect ass of my crush; trying to score beer or weed on the weekends with my friends; getting good grades to get into college; and recovering from Darth being Luke’s dad, (Okay, that last one may just have been me, but you get the idea.)
Now, kids have a lot more to deal with: climate change (yes, it IS real), pandemics, authoritarianism, poverty, AI, hunger, and scoring tickets to the Eras Tour. The world has always been a complicated place to navigate as a young person, and it just seems that modern complications are increasing exponentially.
Sharon Olds writes about the complications of being young . . .
19
by: Sharon Olds
When we took the acid, his wife was off
with someone else, there was a hole in their bedroom
wall where the Steuben wedding owl
had flown from one room right through into another,
I was in love with his best friend, who had
gone into a monastery
after he’d deflowered me, so we
knew each other: when his finished, under
my palm, I could feel the circular ribs of his
penis; I finished with my legs wrapped around his
leg, even with my toes pointed, my
feet reached only halfway down
his calf, later I was lying on the bathroom
floor, looking up at him, naked, he was
6’6”, a decathlete,
my eyes followed the inner line of his
leg, up, up, up,
up, up, up, up.
Weeks later, he would pull a wall-phone
out of a wall, he would cross the divider
in his Mustang at 2 a.m. with me and go
sixty against traffic, crying, I could
hardly hear what he said about the barbed
wire and his father and his balls—but that
acid night, we stayed up all night, I was
not in love with him, so his beauty made me
happy; we chattered, we chatted naked, he
told me everything he liked
about my body—and he liked everything—
even the tiny gooseflesh bumps
around my hard nipples,
he said the way to make love to me
would be from behind, with that sheer angle, his
forefinger drew it, gently, the extreme
hairpin curve of the skinny buttocks,
he said it the way I thought an older
cousin in a dream might give advice
to a younger cousin, his fingertip
barely missing my—whatever, in love, one would
call the asshole—he regarded me with a
savoring kindness, from a cleft of sweet lust in the
human he actually looked at me
and thought how I best should be fucked. Oooh.
Oooh. It meant there was something to be done with me,
something exactly right, he looked at me
and saw it,
willing to not be the one
who did it—all night, he desired me and
protected me, he gazed at my body and un-
saw my parents’ loathing, pore by
pore on my skin he closed that couple’s eyes.
A lot goes on in this poem, The speaker is 19, having sex with a married man she doesn’t love. And she’s on acid. Back in the 1960s, when Olds was young, everything was sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The only thing that’s missing from the poem is the Grateful Dead or Janis Joplin. At the end, the speaker alludes to her parents’ “loathing” on and in her body. Ultimately, that’s what growing up is all about—escaping and/or fixing the mistakes your parents might have made.
I was pretty lucky as a young person. My parents had already raised eight other kids. I was number nine, and, for the most part, I didn’t give them too much to worry about. (Perhaps I was just better at hiding my youthful indiscretions.). Anyway, they didn’t concern themselves with me or put many restrictions on me. If I was heading out the door on a Friday night to spend time with friends, my mom and dad never asked me where I was going or what time I’d be back.
Did I behave myself? Most of the time. Did I engage in activities that would have given my parents more gray hairs? Most definitely. But I survived, as do most young people making stupid decisions. These days, kids have many more ways to be stupid. Hence, I’m glad I came of age in the 1980s.
So, we’ve all been young and stupid at some point in our lives. That’s part of growing up. You learn the difference between good and bad, right and wrong, and you try to make decisions based on that knowledge.
Parents fuck up, too, and, usually, grown-up bad decisions have longer and more harmful consequences. Grownups can start wars, create recessions, politicize science, ban books. Then it falls on the upcoming generation to sweep up the mess the previous generation has left behind. It’s like a cook making a shambles of the kitchen preparing dinner and then leaving the dishes in the sink for somebody else to wash. It ruins the meal.
Every young person has hopes and dreams. Ever since I was in grade school, I wanted to be a published author. It was always my primary ambition. Here I am, decades later, and I’ve published two full-length poetry collections, with a third on the way. Plus, I’ve served as U.P. Poet Laureate for two terms AND been named Writer of the Year by the City of Marquette. I made my dreams a reality. Not many people can make that assertion.
Yet, what is happening now in the world is a direct result of decisions made by my parents’ generation and the generations before them. We’re talking about climate change, nuclear proliferation, poverty, food instability, skyrocketing healthcare costs. My generation inherited these problems and has gone on to make them worse. Now, it’s up to my kids and their friends to clean up the kitchen.
I wish I could say that the world is a better place now than when I was younger, but I know it isn’t. I wish that I was a bestselling, Nobel Prize-winning poet. But I’m not. I’m a husband and father first. Then a poet and friend. Finally, I’m a person of faith and (I hope) integrity and love. If anyone ever writes a biography of me, that’s how I want to be remembered.
Saint Marty wrote a poem about biographies, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:
Write a poem of exactly 100 words on the library’s Dewey Decimal System or on its creator, Melvil Dewey. Feel free to use titles of books, alliteration, and/or alphabetization throughout your poem. You may have to do some research online or at your library to find the right details for your poem.
A Beautiful Day in the Dewey Decimal Neighborhood
by: Martin Achatz
I met Bob by a weedy fork near 921 FRO
while Bill sipped bourbon, scribbled long
sentences on the porch of 921 FAU. Em watched
from her 921 DIC bedroom window,
her moth white gown buttoned to her neck.
Across the street, Chloe saged 921 MOR
to rid its tar paper walls of spite, and Rock-Tree
Boy stood in font of Rainy Mountain to watch
the sun climb over 921 MOM. Peacocks screamed
at dawn, waking everyone at the 921 OCO farm,
the Polish farmhand already milking cows
as Poopsik chased swallowtails through
921 NAB fields of bee balm.
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