Courtesy.(Poem)

 
Courtesy 
 
   I feel so bad for you, my friend, 
   your sufferings unsettle 
   my faith in meaning, I meant to say. 
   I hadn't meant to nettle 
 
   when, sad and blundering, I said, 
   "I know just how you feel" 
   and got it slammed back: "No 
   you don't. You couldn't." "Fool!" 
 
   I didn't snap back even then. 
   Even then I didn't sigh, 
   "You're not the only heartsick boy 
   who's watched his mother die." 
 
   "I meant ... I didn't mean ...," I stuttered. 
   It's not pain's magnitude 
   or the meanings we invent for it 
   we love--they are too crude-- 
   but exclusivity. It's ours, 
   this pain, and thus unique 
   Sure, other fools failed math, were snubbed 
   by the least exclusive clique, 
   and watched their mothers die in bright 
   cold antiseptic beds 
   with plastic tubes and coils of wire 
   exiting their heads. 
 
   Because they didn't love or hate 
   the same books, see the same 
   gray movies that we saw, adored, 
   and can no longer name, 
 
   they can't know us. They didn't sleep 
   with the same lovers seething 
   beside them. They can't hurt as we hurt 
   when we watched Mother's breathing 
 
   stall and go airless. Mom dies. You lose 
   a winning Lotto ticket. 
   A Peterbilt pancakes your cat. 
   Your house flares like a ...