I'm With the Band

My mother told me marry a businessman
Marry someone who wears a suit to work
and will buy you a two thousand dollar watch
for your third anniversary and doesn't buy
his plates at Ikea.
But I'm with the band, still, apparently,
Still a kind of cool that I never realize I possess.
I sit cat poised in short skirts
and long boots near the merch table
because the heels are killing me
watching the birds fly by.
Not young, but almost four lives in,
not as young as these kids,
whose faces are without
real fatigue and who are okay with
Ramen noodle breakfast, lunch, dinner
for a plane ticket to
South America where they will
royal for a semester.
I watch the goldfish, thinking of that other
life when I was always with the band,
and kept like a pet, sleeping on floors
and curled up on bar benches,
my ears ringing for days.
(It wrecks your hearing, but the world is
mercifully more quiet and peaceful
ever after).
Girls in tight jeans, tight boots, black
tank top uniforms, each tattooed on the shoulder,
hair asymmetrical, flocked by
boys who talk too much and laugh.
We are not like that, the girl with the band,
otherly and furtherly,
because same is no muse.
To be ten years ago. But I drift to the
future even in this moment,
ten years ahead. I am not anchored
in the present as I once believed.
Drunk men never cease to amaze me.
"Are you with the band?" he asks,
"And what do you do?"
I hug him because
I never have to lie.