for pete's sake in poetry

two of my ex-girlfriends
were both hit on by the
kid who played Older Pete
on the Nickelodeon show
“The Adventures of Pete and Pete”
but it’s not like I grew up with him
it’s not like there’s a logical explanation
it’s not like I bear my own connection
to Older Pete
I’ve never even met Older Pete
he wouldn’t know me from Adam
but once in the early to middle nineties
in suburban New Jersey and
once in the late nineties
at a college in Westchester County
he hit on two of my ex-girlfriends
I don’t know
I want it to mean something
I want there to be some cosmic significance
as if I am some kind of ur-Pete
as if nineties tween nostalgia
is somehow connected to me
through people who chose to see me naked
while at some other time rejecting Older Pete
this must be what it is like
to be religious

reaching out there blindly
making up little stories
to explain the coincedences of life
give it an order and a purpose
give it an intelligence
when it’s all pretty much random
and stupid and amazing and fluky
it’s just as ridiculous
to assign unexplainable magic
to a monster or monsters in the sky
so your tragedies make some sort of sense
as it is to presume that
I must have some connection to Pete and Pete
because of a particularly interesting coincedence

there was a big bang once
and everything just sort of happened
and anyone pushing anything else
is either crazy or running a long con

there was a lascivious young actor
there’s a lot of those and
there are these city girls
who I tend to have better luck with
than the country girls I grew up with
who want to date the kind of guy
who’ll crash a snowmobile drunk
into a gravestone on a Thursday
and if I try to push it as anything else
I’m either crazy or making stuff up to be clever

and that’s it
two of my ex-girlfriends
were both hit on by the
kid who played Older Pete
because life is weird
it had to happen to a few people
one of them just happened to be me
I just happened to hit the Pete lottery
there’s no meaning to it
still
imagining it does somehow
it makes a hell of a story

as long as we can admit
it’s just a story
it’s just a story for fun

Last updated April 02, 2015