i should be in new york city instead in poetry

middle of June always gets me down
but especially when I'm back home
all the really nasty things happened
in the middle of June
when I was a kid
before the Jell-O in my head set
and you could bake in things
like the middle of June
getting you down

everybody seemed to die
or break up
or break down
or fall apart
in the middle of June
the real bad parts of the summer the stifling two months of ninety-nine percent humidity
in upstate New York at the edge of the Adirondacks
starts in the middle of June
so you have to crank up the air conditioners
even at night
and wake up with an earache every morning
everyone talks about the long awful winters
in the place where I grew up
but I'll take them ten thousand times
over that awful brief sticky summer
two months of swimming through a haze
of a sky just about to rain
but never quite raining
perpetually pregnant with rain
never quite getting there
that haze to swim through
like a sea of clarified butter
with occasional swarms of mosquitoes
blotting out the sun
but never cutting down the sweat
eating me alive
through the anniversaries
and the graveyard visits
and the nervous breakdowns

and the problems I can never fix
and the pains that never go away
and every face I pass reminds me
of one scar or another
and every face
is the goddamned same
I should be in New York City
where nobody knew me
and nobody cared
and no one told me I should be over it by now
because no one knew a goddamned thing about me
just another wash-out
no one knows

being nobody beats the hell
out of every spoken name
having a meaning you don't wanna remember
losing yourself in minutiae
going absent-minded to stave off regret
but all it does is stave
you never forget
because everyone looks like someone
and the same names keep coming up
and the patterns they set into motion
keep happening again

the middle of June
fucking brings me down
especially in my hometown
two hundred miles away
might as well be a million miles away too
but I'd like New York in June
how about you?