I Wrote a Letter to Myself at 17, It Came Back Returned to Sender

By the time I receive this letter,
it will be years before I start,
because time-travel is a lie.
Writing to one's younger self
probably won't change anything
that made me want to write this
exercise in begging my own past

to forgive me, in the first place.
Forget the usual time travel tropes;
assume nothing I do to the past
is going to radically alter anything.
Never mind re-written futures;
never mind fractal parallels;
There's plenty I can screw up

in the time period where I live.
I warn 17-year old me, "Avoid
romantic anythings with women
named Amy or Ann or Jennifer."
But I'd likely make very similar
sad story mistakes, just different
names carved on my soft inner-skin.

I worry 17 year-old me, receiving
this time-traveled letter, and surging
with youthful sureness, might re-write
me as a paladin of romance , doomed
and too beautiful. I worry he'd worship
that. Better he shred the letter, "Forget
you old man! I'm gonna be an astronaut."

I Don't Don't Like Mondays (Nov. 30/30 #1)

(prompt: There are seven days of the week, and one of them hates you.  Oddly enough, it isn't
Monday...)
                       

Everybody hates
Monday; the punch-
line to working class
humor; buttered bread
of comic strips. Grin 
and bear it wisdom.

Me? Too busy lost
in always incoming
tides of dedication
to the drink; gasp
at the air and sink
down willingly.

Washing my wounds
in salt-water. Self-care
for those dead-set
on drowning; knowing
which way is up, but
swimming in the other.

Throwing-up daily
on the harsh and brutal
shores of Living
On the Rocks; always
scared, always thirsty,
always, almost always,

I didn't know how
else to live. Never
feared a Monday,
per se; but instead,
any day of the week
that ended in "y"...