Wasted Your Life, Now What? By Chad Parenteau

You can’t take anymore.

This taffy pull of a 

cocktease, a cyclical 

jerk that can never end

happily. So you’re a 

hitchhiker now, realizing 

that a house only exists 

to keep you from going 

home. All you can hope 

for from people face to 

face is mutually assured 

distraction. You search

in all directions for the 

center. That can’t be right,

can it? It’s time to explore

now that your leaders 

have gotten what they 

wanted. You won’t be 

killed for looking up from

those performative hand 

motions you no longer 

understand. There’s got 

to be more than the eulogy

others wrote for you when

you were twenty years 

stupider and only wanted

a warm body to wake up 

to without being insulted. 

Chad Parenteau hosts Boston’s Stone Soup Poetry series. His work has appeared in Résonancee, Molecule, Ibbetson Street, Pocket Lint, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Tell-Tale Inklings, Off The Coast, The Skinny Poetry Journal, The New Verse News, dadakuku, Nixes Mate Review and The Ugly Monster. He has also been published in anthologies such as French Connections, Sounds of Wind, Reimagine America, and The Vagabond Lunar Collection. His newest collections are All's Well Isn't You and Cant Republic: Erasures and Blackouts. He serves as Associate Editor of Oddball Magazine and co-organizer of the annual Boston Poetry Marathon. He lives in Boston.