Weekend Update

Four single friends, three bedrooms
plus a sofa, first jobs out of college,
weekdays working late, weekends
pouring wine for someone else’s guest,
when parties didn’t start before 11,
when improv on TV was new,
when we were wild and crazy guys,
re-enacting skits we’d memorized.
Where the party went from there God only knew.

Laughter then was Cherry Coke
a sugar rush of comic bits
shaken, fizzing up
a running over cup of greatest hits.

Now in independent living
awaiting dinner served at four,
ancient boomers watch old episodes
of SNL, our laughter thickened into caramel
sea-salted with familiarity of comics
on the scene when we were young,
Weekend Update anchors half a century ago.
As if the party never stopped
I fill a glass of wine for someone new.
How she knows my name I couldn’t say
but she just made me laugh.
No one can make us stop
don’t even try.

That was how it felt to be alive
when we were younger than our fears.
That was how it felt to laugh, minus 50 years.

 

 

 

About the Poet:
Kevin Shyne is a lifelong writer whose work once filled the pages of corporate annual reports, but now appears in poetry journals including Clementine Unbound, Poetry Porch, Poetry Breakfast, The Avocet and The Lyric.

 

 

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