My Poetry Year: Entry #47

In which Your Humble Blogger identifies a habit of watching cable news in bed just before you fall asleep as a mark of Respectable Adulthood:

"A Longtime Friend Comes for a Visit"

It's the worn house, once knocking at the joints,
That you braced and propped into something respectable.
You sealed the widest gaps tight against the teenage rain,
You fit the blinds carefully to the windows,
You planned, you pushed, and finally, at night,
You were able to watch cable news in bed, in peace.
But now, your friend's blowing in, and you recall
That you might not have set all the traps in the basement.
Some say that life is in the imperfect details:
The missing shingle, the hornet's nest threatening the porch,
The night you and your friend smashed melons at the store,
Just because. And what will you say
When your old friend tells you that
She preferred the life that you were putting together
Back when your house was falling apart?

* * *

It's been a while since I've watched some shows on TV. (Actually, it's been a while since I've watched most TV. I catch some episodes of 'So You Think You Can Dance' on Hulu weeks after they've aired, and for now, that's it.) But wasn't there an episode of 'Full House' in which Uncle Jesse's old bandmates come to visit him at the Tanner house, only to find him saddled with adult responsibility, in response to which they throw down the irresistible challenge embodied in such sentences as, "Dude, you've changed"?

This is the poetry equivalent of that.