John Hughes

              — to all the Neo Maxi Zoom Dweebies

It’s February 18, 2025, John Hughes’s birthday.

Altered Images is singing in my head.

The fact that he’s dead doesn’t stop me

from celebrating the birth of this man, 

the man who understood us:

The Xers, Gen X, latchkey kids.

He was the Nicholas Ray of the 1980s, 

capturing us like wild animals 

in our rawest forms of cliques, bullies,

perceptions of popularity,

with a backdrop of vacant parents,

parents who hadn’t yet descended  

from The Who’s helicopter 

to master Parenthood.

Hughes made sure 

that The Duckies, The Buellers,

and the Keith &Watts’s of this world

found their way out of the maelstrom of youth.

We got the message. 

And we survived.

Sixteen candles have burned 

since Hughes left us.

There are kids somewhere right now

who are at a TikTok dance

in a gymnasium of a friend’s phone.

But if you ask them if they’d rather watch,

The Breakfast Club or Barbie,

they’d choose The Breakfast Club.

They want to survive, too.