the regularness of life

poem and commentary

Photo by Sonny Sixteen on Pexels

no matter how many fanciful realities I churn 
out at night, the morning still comes, and the ceiling 
is ordinary, my limits are ordinary…
there is no spaceship parked out back, 
there is no fairy creature to make this man-child fly… 
the regularness of life bears down on me 
and I gnash my teeth with all the grief 
that a sour heart can take…
it’s the abhorrent regularness of all the people 
and the brutal ways in which they behave — 
how they get up and trade their breathing lives 
for concepts and ideas, trade their fleeting lives for objects, 
waste their little time on frivolous content — 
all stuff to fill the space that once occupied 
their soul 
…it’s hard for me to take, you know, 
this one-day-down, this on-to-the-next thing way of being, 
this roll over until it’s over-sort of life…
yet when I look up to the sky, I still hope 
for dragons,
and when I look down below I still 
fear the demons, and 
when I close my eyes I still hear sirens 
screaming from a landscape 
that isn’t there, 
so, tell me, what kind of prayer is that?

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“I don’t know, Tony,” says Chris, “it’s like just the fucking regularness of life is too fucking hard for me or something … I don’t know.” 
 — Micheal Imperioli as Christopher from The Sopranos, S1, episode 8, The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti

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Garbage Notes:

So this is one of my favorite poems I’ve written. It also garnered quite a bit of attention when I first posted it on Medium earlier this year. I don’t know, maybe there’s a lot of Sopranos fans still out there that remembered the scene, but I had actually only watched the show this year for the very first time. And that moment where Chris Moltisanti said this quote—it really stuck with me and resonated.

What I find to be the case, so often, is that the best writing tends to come to me quick, like, straight out of a dream, like it was just brewing in my brain all night long and had to pour out of me upon waking. It must be the brain trying to consolidate everything it learned the day before or something. Anyway, it’s rare, but it does happen. And this was definitely one of those times.

I think the poem itself speaks to how boring life can feel sometimes, how jaded we can get when things don’t work out, when our narrative arc, so to speak, doesn’t feel clear to us. There’s quite a bit of allusion to fantasy and daydreaming, and yearning for something more magical to take place. It also sort of speaks to our relationship with other people and trying to live up to the expectations of the real world—whether that’s our family’s expectations, loved ones, authority figures, or whatever. Society pushes us in the direction of the boring, the unoriginal, and sometimes it feels easier to just cave and live a “regular” life than pursue the dream lives we all would prefer but seem so elusive.

In the show, Chris was sort of lost, caught between his commitments to Tony and The Family, and his desire to live a more meaningful and ambitious life. Maybe even one that was closer to a sense of happiness. Whether it was having family with Adriana or pursuing the passions of being a creative person in Hollywood. It really felt like Chris’s story was one of being torn in different directions, between the drug use, the violence, and overwhelming loss at every corner. His arc was one of constant unfolding tragedy.

When all was said and done, Chris Moltisanti ended up being my favorite character. Even in his sort of charming simple-mindedness, he had a knack for saying some of the most profound and philosophical things on the entire show. So, yeah, that’s where the inspiration for this poem came from. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you’re also a fan of the Sopranos, I think you’ll like it too.

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