Sestina About Hangovers For a 25-Year-Old From a Person Over 40

You told me you had a hangover

But you are really just a youth

You don’t understand failure

You don’t truly understand the demoralization of having been wasted

And waking up to utter misery

Wondering if there’s any point to being alive

You are still in a reality where you think water, or bacon, might make you feel alive

Might make your hangover

And your misery

Give way to your resplendent youth

And within minutes of properly hydrating you will cease to be sorry you got wasted

As you bid farewell to failure

I am afraid of bowing to failure

As I try to explain to you what it’s like to not want to be alive

Just because you got wasted

And have a hangover

Or perhaps I resent you for your extreme youth

And elementary comprehension of misery

Actually I have no idea what you think of misery

Or failure.

I have no idea what your relationship is to your youth

What’s it’s like you be you, experiencing being alive

With your toy hangover

The result of having gotten wasted

With so little understanding perhaps of the horrible reasons we get wasted

Of the true though largely theoretical depths of your misery

Which when you are older are refracted through a hangover

which when large enough creates a sensation that failure

Is endemic not only to you but to all those alive.

But since you are a youth

And youth

is wasted

on the barely alive

and their toy misery

that makes sport of failure

as it ducks every hangover

In conclusion: just focus on staying alive. Big breakfast your way out of misery.

Ignore me and your youth. Get wasted.

Enjoy for these waning instants the failure of your hangover.

Previously: Sestina For an Annoying Publicist

Photo via rogerss1/flickr.

Sarah Miller is the author of Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn and The Other Girl. She lives in Nevada City, CA. Follow her on Twitter @sarahlovescali.