! Moments Like Knife Cuts Poem by Michael Shepherd

They’re too silly to be serious,
too serious to be silly…

those moments when your raw
adolescent ego (and how long it lasted…)
is hurt to the quick…

how you’d like to forget it,
it’s so trivial… but you can’t;
so then, you’d like to laugh at it;
maybe make a jokey verse about it…
but that doesn’t work, either…
and, as if it mattered…

when I was forever desperate
for the approval of any stranger,
let alone a friend,
someone brought along to meet us
such a stranger whom we all admired,
all wished to be…

discreetly, we presented him
with what we hoped would find
some favour in his eyes…

the report on the two of us
came back: ‘One has a mean mouth;
the other is a nonentity…’

the ‘other one’ reported this to me;
could not bear to speculate, I felt,
which, he, which, me…

fifty years ago,
it’s still rattling around in the memory,
waiting to be erased,
or to be laughed out of court…

adolescence, once, is quite enough:

I’m still wondering, which one to choose
that would have hurt me more…