Boomers

•

The hard drinkers are gone now, the ones
who could manage, even in high school,
who could hold their liquor while the rest
of us passed out or stumbled off to barf
in the bushes, or leaned over the bowl
and puked our guts out.
                                        The heavy smokers
are mostly dead, too, though a few of them
are still hanging around, tethered to tanks
of oxygen they drag along behind them
like tar babies, never able to get unstuck.
The overachievers are mostly gone, too,
the ones who put together the big deals,
who worked late at the office, who knew
it would all come together if they just
kept up the pressure. It did.
                                               It really
came together when their hearts began
to give off that strange flicker you see
just before a sixty-watt light bulb goes
poof!
         and somebody comes to sweep up the slivers,
and put them in the trash.

Who does that leave? The ultra cools,
the smooth operators, the laid-back types
who’ve gone through two messy divorces
and three messy marriages, who have lost
or misplaced their hair, who have bellies
so big they can’t tie their own shoes,
who can’t get it up anymore, who still
sit around and talk about it anyway,
as smooth as ever.
                                It leaves the sharp guys,
the “creative” types, the agency people
who fronted for the big corporations,
who did PR for the banks and the brokers,
who dodged the wars and greased the boodling,
who’ve just moved back from the Beltway
and have no friends at all.
                                            And the types
who sold you a used car thirty years ago
that never ran worth a damn, who call you “Pal”
and “Buddy” when they meet you on the street
and try to sell you some life insurance.

And it leaves the ones we used to call
the bungled and botched, who could
never quite get it together, or get it on,
or even get it off again. They plod along,
coughing on an occasional cigarette,
still unable to get high on reefer
(they never did learn how to inhale),
drinking their one martini per evening,
always staying within their limits.
They never got promoted to that top job,
never really had the smarts or the moxie
or whatever it takes to earn yourself
a triple-bypass by the age of sixty.
Some of them even go to church.
                                                       They’ll live
forever, in a few years the nursing homes
will be clogged with them, sitting there
in their motorized wheel chairs,
the TV turned to no channel at all.

But what about those hard drinkers?
What about those juicers, coke-heads,
pill-poppers, power-brokers, players—
all those people you knew who simply
couldn’t take it one day at a time
but had to find some way to speed it up?
Everybody always told them if they
didn’t mend their ways, they’d never
see sixty. Remember?
                                     They just laughed,
opened another bottle of gin, and lit
another cigarette. Don’t feel sorry
for them, they all got exactly what
they wanted. They were always sharp,
they always had some way of getting
the inside track.
                            Wherever it is we’re
all heading for, they showed us how smart
they really were. They got there first.