When It Becomes
No matter the smarts
they have to start over
the boy or girl the girl or boy
inventing fun, inventing heartache,
inventing the paths through the storm
and the storm itself, the boy-girl or the
girl-boy, opening the folds of the world
like a cardboard box that won’t yield easy,
surprised as they have to be no matter
who has given the heads-up about what,
because down there they can’t learn what
they don’t know.
There’s a reason
you can’t tell them anything: you don’t
know anything, or nothing they need
to know when they need to know it.
Reprinted with permission from All the Good Hiding Places: Poems by Ralph Adamo, Black Widow Press, 2020.
