Matt Pasca: Dear Super Loud White Guy
Photo: Joanna C. Valente
Dear Super Loud White Guy
My guess is your unchecked
laughter wasn’t commissioned
by the mayor, shop owner, anyone—
not your brazen, caffeinated
inflection, as if bathed in the salted
gluttony of halftime mancave. We know
now, you watch a lot of Sex in the City,
or, “more than most guys”. Your
sister’s favorite is Charlotte. Turns out
the only time a guy gave a damn
about her was when she had cancer.
So you say. And I wonder if you know
you’re in public. How much space
you must swallow on the train,
in waiting rooms. I wonder
who you were in school, on the
playground, at the beach, stomping
on a girl’s boogie board till her
dad yelled STOP. Maybe you
cried every day and this incessant
narration at obscene decibels
is a fuck you to the world. Maybe
your therapist suggested you sit in
cafés and pretend no one else matters.
Narcissism therapy she called it.
Maybe you were hoping we’d join
in, answer the clarion call of your
cacophonous sass, pull up next
to your cabal of monied
doppelgangers still mourning
their parents’ divorces. Maybe
you’re still drunk from yesterday’s
parade, torn shamrocks
fluttering on the curb of your
consciousness. Maybe all your days
are impromptu speeches screamed
into space, the rest of us disembodied ears
on long sticks over your rhetorical fire,
melting like marshmallows. Maybe you’re
just a dick. Or maybe you’re a decent
guy slipped back into the comfort
of his skin & gender on a Sunday
afternoon, in a café on Third
Avenue. Whoever you are,
I have silenced you in ink, folded
your blare & oblivion into neat
triangles & flicked them through
the uprights of my brown
soundproof notebook.
Matt Pasca is an educator, editor and author of two poetry collections: A Thousand Doors (2011 Pushcart nominee), and Raven Wire (2017 Eric Hoffer Book Award Finalist). Matt serves as Assistant Poetry Editor of 2 Bridges Review, facilitates The Sunday Grind, a bi-weekly writing workshop, curates Second Saturdays @Cyrus, a popular NY poetry series, and spreads his unwavering faith in critical thought and word magic to his Poetry, Mythology and Literature students at Bay Shore High School, where he has taught for 22 years. www.mattpasca.com
