The Big Ol’ Lovable

I’m not much, but I’m pretty much all I think about.

When I first heard that in an AA meeting, I was stunned by how true it is. Me, myself, and I make up the goofy trio that basically runs my interior monologue.
It takes an effort to think about other people. Pretty pathetic, isn’t it?
Is everybody essentially self-conscious? Or is it just me?
I’m so self-centered, I even wrote a love poem about being on the receiving end of my family’s love.

Big Ol’ Lovable Me

They love me, that crazy batch of people
who apparently cherish the me they see on the
outside, this marionette who does my bidding,
although I can’t imagine what they perceive.

I am quaint, I guess, a nice middle-aged woman
with a smile and a kind word for everyone and
a sad one now and then when my puppet master
decides to throw some angst into the act. I say

Thank you for loving me; but I marvel why
when inside seems such a concatenation of
off-key syllables and scenery and very little
of what one might call goodness. I am delirious

with confusion, held in check by strands in the
hands of the me who walks the outer world
while the inner world mourns my secrets
and those fat thighs and flabby belly which

attend me everywhere. A constant piratical arg
tunelessly hums in my head as I go about
the business of being lovable, as if I were hopeless,
really, and altogether unlike the dear sweet
woman aging tenderly in the minds of others.