Letter to Holden Caulfield
If somebody catch somebody …
So Holden you really killed me, y’know, dude,
chewing the fat in that book.
Back in the day you were everywhere,
you really were,
kicking that Kolynos box down the road,
waitin’ for the next girl to come along
and we did come along too,
if you really want to know,
but by the time you got around to askin’ us out
we were all taken.
Sure we were.
Wasn’t that the way your life worked?
Always some other guy,
handsome as hell,
tryin’ to give us the time
in the back of some old coupe
borrowed from his dad.
Nothin’ like the car you were goin’ to buy, right?
In your dreams, Holden, in your dreams.
So how you doin’, anyway?
God being good to you, up there?
No phoneys, right?
We’ve survived Woodstock, The Monkees and nuclear war,
now it’s a goddam pandemic.
I swear you wouldn’t know the world now,
nothin’s cool any more.
No more blowin’ smoke up your ass
in some lousy night club joint.
Nothin’s fun, that’s the rules.
Even old Phoebe wouldn’t be climbing trees any more
in case she fell, you know, grazed a knee,
something real dangerous like that.
These modern kids got no understandin’ at all,
just pokin’ some goddam screen,
I swear to God.
Nah, kids wouldn’t amuse the hell out of you any more.
And another thing, Holden,
you’d never get to first base with us girls
singing that dumb song.
© Jan FitzGerald
Jan FitzGerald’s work has appeared regularly in NZ literary journals since 1970 and been published in the States in Loch Raven Review, The Atlanta Review, Yellow Medicine Review, and in the UK in The London Magazine, Orbis, The High Window, and Acumen. She has been an Acumen guest poet and shortlisted twice in the Bridport Poetry Prize. Her latest and fourth poetry book is titled A question bigger than a hawk (The Cuba Press, 2022)
The Loch Raven Review 