MY RIVAL
by Stewart Berg
A reply across time to Kipling’s “My Rival.” Where that work concerns a young woman’s complaint toward the attentions paid to older women, this is about a similar complaint made by a young man.
I go to concert, party, ball—
What profit is in these?…
— “My Rival” Rudyard Kipling
I go to concert, party, ball —
What profit is in these?
I stand alone against the wall,
And strive to look at ease.
The forms that should be mine by sense,
Their eyes elsewhere incline,
And that’s because I’m seventeen
While He is forty-nine.
I cannot check my boyish blush,
My color comes and goes;
I redden to my fingertips,
And sometimes to my nose.
But He, it seems, has it mastered,
How to His mien design:
The blush that flies at seventeen,
Well feigned by forty-nine.
I wish I had His year’s income,
Or even just a week’s,
With which to do all sorts of things,
Like entice His same physiques;
I know with just His job and cash,
I could buy His place in line,
But it can’t be changed: my seventeen
For all His forty-nine.
Young ladies come, young ladies go,
Each cute and plump and firm;
He’s without their generation,
But his head, to them, they turn.
They tussle for His glances
(None so much as notice mine),
All because here’s seventeen,
But there is forty-nine.
He goes about with half a dozen
(He calls them “Girls” and “Friends”);
I walk about the streets alone,
Caring not where I wend,
Cursing self all the while
For the very day and time,
Most loudly disclaiming I am seventeen,
While He is forty-nine.
He calls me “Sport,” “Boy,” and “Lad,”
Without slightest offense,
But I hear in them only taunts,
Each making me more incensed.
Now, I’ve no recourse, I know;
I can do no more than whine,
Crying unfair that I must see seventeen
Beside His forty-nine.
But even He must older grow,
And end His strapping days;
He can’t go on forever so,
For the Stage demands fresh Plays.
Thus, one ray of priceless hope, I see,
On my footsteps does shine:
Just think, He’ll find himself eighty-one,
When I am forty-nine!
Mr. Berg grew up split between rural Texas and a Seattle suburb. After graduating from Pacific Lutheran University in 2014, he moved to Austin, where he began publishing his Miscellanea series of eBooks before joining the Press. He lives in Marble Falls, Texas.
