Was it Really Thirty Years Ago?
The calendar says the Seventies
were fifty years past,
but my body insists otherwise.
Time froze at the Millennium—
Y2K the great taxidermist—
so I carry the decades like pelts,
still warm on my shoulders.
Look: born in ’73,
I entered the Eighties at five(ish) years old,
emerged at fifteen—
a whole decade was two-thirds of my life,
so fat and weighted it swallowed me whole.
The Nineties, thinner, only 40 percent—
already life was teaching subtraction.
Each decade thereafter diminishing,
a ration cut with sand,
until the present felt cheap by comparison:
the 2020s may last ten years,
but they are only a fifth of my life,
a sliver,
a slice of bread thinner than memory.
Do the math:
a year in the Eighties was worth
3.6 years of now—
no wonder the past hounds me
like a dog let off leash,
no wonder it still smells so close,
like HDPE plastic, one letter away
from hope, like ozone in a strip-mall arcade.
Maybe that’s why we live in compression:
why childhood sounds louder upon inspection
its decibelocity
more intense than any boardroom
meeting or election cycle,
why decades collapse into the scale of rooms.
Time isn't lines, it's fractions—
denominators swelling beneath us
memory shrinking into numerators
clutched, mere relics.
Still we argue—
Seventies, thirty or fifty years ago?
I’ll take the math of a body over dusty glyphs,
the ratios of wonder over history’s clock.
Because the past enlarges
the way mirrors do in funhouses—
each reflection insisting we are
closer to each other, closer to all of this,
than we appear.
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