Driver’s Ed FOMO
Let’s workshop this poem about how society lets young teens make some life-altering decisions while forbidding them from making others--particularly around all that an adult has to teach about sex.
SCENT OF THE DAY: Gujarat, by Olympic Orchids
roasted brown Indian spices plus lime sour pickle spice market plus synthetic white musk. Think of it like a more leathery-lime-booze-oud spin on Aziyade. It is like if you combined the olibanum-jasmine leather of Anubis with Aziyade cardamom-olibanum curry—1 part Anubis, 3 parts Aziyade (plus 1 part Areej synthetic musk wildness). This might even beat the better-blended Aziyade—it is a bit more sprawling and wild and more currylike and artisinal in feel but I like that. Amazing quite frankly. It leaning into synthetics but with none of the annoying amberwoods of something like Azman’s Risk, which I wore the other night. This has the spice intensity of a Shamama attar—the sort that Russian Adam intended to pay homage to in his Ambre de Coco. The white-musk cola vibe is very present on my third wear. Spice quotient has gone way down. Another one like Epic Man that shows how pleasant white musk can be. It is nothing like real musk but it has big pros not limited to nostalgia
Driver’s Ed FOMO In the rare case—extremely rare, with childhood now bleeding into the thirties—where the ninth-grader has enough Marian agency to consent to abort, why fret—boho mom on board—about her shifting, grinding, the retired stick next door any chance she gets?
“Driver’s Ed FOMO” is a brief, corrosive satire about incoherence in contemporary attitudes toward adolescent agency, especially where sexuality, reproduction, and adult moral supervision intersect. The poem’s force lies in its speed: it moves from a sociological diagnosis of delayed adulthood, to a deliberately provocative hypothetical about abortion consent, to an image of an underage girl erotically pursuing an older man next door. Rather than arguing discursively, it compresses a contradiction into a single burst of rhetorical pressure.
The opening lines establish the poem’s anthropological frame: “childhood now bleeding / into the thirties.” This is not merely generational complaint but the premise for everything that follows. The poem assumes a culture in which adulthood is delayed, protected, and psychologically deferred far beyond biological maturity. Against that backdrop, the “ninth-grader” becomes a flashpoint. The phrase “in the rare case—extremely rare” is crucial because the poem is not claiming adolescents generally possess robust agency; rather, it isolates the exceptional case in which a young teenager might have “enough / Marian agency to consent / to abort.” “Marian” carries obvious theological resonance, invoking Mary as a figure of adolescent pregnancy, consent, and sanctified maternity. The term therefore folds religious history into modern reproductive politics, suggesting that debates about youthful agency are never free from older cultural archetypes.
The central provocation is the poem’s question: if one grants that this teenager has enough agency to make a grave reproductive decision, why become scandalized by her actively seeking sexual contact with the “retired stick / next door”? The poem’s target is not the permissibility of exploitation by an adult man; it is the selective deployment of agency language. The satire presses on what it sees as a moral asymmetry: youthful decisional capacity is affirmed when it supports one politically or culturally approved choice, then suspended when it would imply sexual initiative of a more troubling kind. The mother’s presence—“boho mom / on board”—sharpens this critique by introducing permissive or progressive adult endorsement. The girl is not acting in a vacuum; she is imagined within a milieu that selectively ratifies some forms of autonomy while panicking at others.
The title, “Driver’s Ed FOMO,” is especially pointed. “Driver’s ed” evokes formal preparation for a threshold of independence, while “FOMO” names the restless anxiety of missing out that defines much of contemporary youth culture. Together they suggest a condition in which young people are symbolically ushered toward autonomy while being psychically trained to feel behind, excluded, or incomplete. In that context, the girl’s “shifting, / grinding” reads not just as sexual behavior but as an enactment of desire under the sign of acceleration—wanting to arrive at adulthood, experience, or danger before being left out of it.
The poem’s rhetoric is intentionally abrasive. It uses the image of the “retired stick / next door” to collapse suburban banality, generational distance, and sexual threat into a single figure. The older man is not romanticized; he appears as a crude emblem of the adult world onto which adolescent desire or projection fastens. That matters because the poem does not resolve the distinction between a young person’s initiative and an adult’s obligation. Instead, it lingers in the discomfort of a culture that wants to talk about empowerment, consent, and bodily autonomy in clean, administrable categories even when actual desire, immaturity, and power gaps remain messy and unstable.
What makes the poem effective is that it is not really about one ninth-grader. It is about a larger cultural confusion over what counts as agency, when it is recognized, and how it is politically distributed. The image of “childhood… bleeding / into the thirties” suggests that society simultaneously infantilizes many adults and selectively adultifies some minors. “Driver’s Ed FOMO” condenses that contradiction into a scandalized question, forcing the reader to confront whether our moral vocabulary is principled or merely situational.
satirical poetry, adolescent agency, delayed adulthood, abortion and consent, sexual politics, Marian imagery, cultural contradiction, youth culture, FOMO, autonomy discourse, moral inconsistency