Most Lives Split the Difference

There’s a kind of conversation game
In which you get asked to choose between
Two perfectly horrible choices—

Would you rather be eaten alive
By fire ants or carnivorous crabs?
Fun’s in the absurd grotesquerie

Of such unlikely scenarios—
Would you rather lick a sewage pipe
Or the hairs off a tarantula?

Adolescents, unsurprisingly,
Excel at and revel in such games.
Having sometimes been drawn into one,

You’re familiar with the formula,
Enough it runs on autopilot
In your ruminative elder’s head,

Tending however to be transformed
Into unfunny, realistic
Scenarios you’ve seen in lived lives—

Would you rather have had an awful
Parent with whom you half-reconciled
Only at the close of their old age

Or a kind parent who adored you
And who you adored, your mentor and friend,
Dead before you got out of your teens?

You’d hope your own child chose the second,
You think, maybe? You’re fantasizing
Too much there about your parenting.