Future Missed Connection

I began to have memories that didn't happen to me
and when I figured out I was seeing into the future
(a revelation embarassingly long in coming)
being a child of the internet generation,
I wrote about what I foresaw,
and I posted it on Craiglist.

I expected the flagged posts, and the spam-bots,
and general incredulity
but what I learned is,
everyone wants to fuck a psychic.
Jesus, the things they wrote to me!
Hiding behind a decoy email address
I received in compensation for my gift
a cross-section of human desire.

In retrospect, maybe Missed Connections
wasn't the right forum for unburdening my prescient notions
but like everyone else posting there,
I was straining to describe someone I didn't know
and could identify only by context:
the circumstances of their adumbrated and usually violent fortune.

I never did hear back from any of the people I tried to track down,
and ever since I stopped drinking I don't remember the future anymore.
But I did meet a man
who wrote to tell me I was doing the public a service
and, for all the lewd or vile or inexplicable things that people offered to do to me,
I learned that my greatest turn-on
is credit where credit is due.

But, psychic or not,
I never guessed that he would knock me up.
Our son is due in June;
we're going to name him Craig.