How To Have Your Cake
How To Have Your Cake
by Halifax
(and eat it too)
Ran out of childhood
it’s over and I can taste it
mealy freezer burned
sweet frosting in my mouth
angry from the rush
a bus roaring past my stop
left behind potential
so much there in estimation
No cars on the way
the road is filled with glass
crystalline sprinkles
on my corner piece of mind
monsters defeated
front yard pinata allegories
always bow broken
before they cut the cake
extinguished wishes
some humble, some mean
breath and sentiment
wasted on birthday candles
monsters full of me
my gifts are empty boxes
they saved the last
for me after everyone left
coffee black enough
hot, bitter, slow percolated
no kid could drink it
breaks through creme icing
my tongue set free
trunk packed with presents
I take a whack at it
meet family for the big slice
I’ve read thru this piece a couple times and the ‘childhood’ portrayed here is less than picturesque. What good can we glean from it? I like how the poem opens in expressing how the author wanted it over with: “Ran out of childhood it’s over and I can taste it mealy freezer burned sweet frosting in my mouth”. Very to the point and it sets tone for rest of poem. Beginning in 2nd stanza the author takes us back in time to a sort of metaphoric dream/nightmare sequence where he misses the bus and presumably begins walking a solitary path strewn with glass.
The allusions to the birthday party, what would normally be the quintessential highpoint in a child’s life are resplendent with symbols harkening broken dreams/hopes–“extinguished wishes some humble, some mean breath and sentiment wasted on birthday candles”.
Empty boxes as presents add to this dark mood and the sudden bubbling up of coffee in the birthday cake would seem to alude to a ‘growing up too soon’–coffee being a symbol for adulthood with all its responsibilities and real world sacrifices.
The last stanza wraps up poem on good note where the poet is able to speak (make sense of life) and is aware of the beauties he was formerly denied–“take a whack at it” (pinata reference) and “meet family for the big slice”–he creates his own reality and gains a recompensation or even attonement for a situation in which he was very powerless to affect as a child.
I think we’re entitled to have the kind of childhood we always wanted when we reach adulthood. That’s how to have your cake and eat it too–willfully but with the peace of perspective lightening our tricycle path.
My daughter found the recipe for the cake shown in the photograph and made it this weekend for me. She’s so sweet.
I love this one. My husband is Halifax.
He’s a lucky man.