Alice Allan

Stakes

Bad Boys for Life

None of us escaped the snap-to-grid.

Money’s nag, its organising force,

the itch for real estate, another kid,

a compromise that might delay divorce,

more hazy resolutions to do better.

All stale and obvious as what we did—

house party hand job, weed with someone’s brother,

carpark tequila—every nervous first

diminished by the mild suburban smother.

Naïve, thin-skinned, I felt your careless worst,

ignored it for your best, and glamourised

the way you losers lost, and loved each other.

Nostalgia builds a shrine from the debris

of everything that’s wrecked and pissed away,

attended by some tragic devotee

convinced there’s something more she needs to say.

My sweet bad boys, your faces looked like home.

Ordinary. Precious. Part of me.

I fell in with these Christians who were experts

on everything Joss Whedon used to do.

Every Monday night, at Bible study,

they’d quickly get distracted, high on sugar

(the sugar soothing horniness, or doubt),

then start debating whether Buffy’s Angel

was good, or bad, or bad but slightly good,

and come to no conclusion. No one minded

me, who’d never even seen the show.

Driving home, not really understanding

why I went, or what I hoped to find,

I’d half-consult the stars, with no idea

about the inconclusiveness to come—

the story getting weirder, hard to swallow,

with characters whose actions made no sense

and others who would die for no real reason,

every scene a new futility,

like mashing buttons on a dead remote

pointed at a broken television,

blank and silent, switched off at the wall.

Alice Allan  lives in Melbourne, Australia, where she produces the podcast Poetry Says. She is the author of The Empty Show (Rabbit Poets, 2019) and the chapbook Blanks (Slow Loris, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Literary Matters, Australian Book Review, and Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry, among others.