Flaps his arms with the winged exuberance
Of a baby bird and shouts “Geronimo!”
As he flings himself off the high board,
His skinny little body flash-frozen like a popsicle
The instant it strikes the water.
Reads The Stranger when he’s nineteen
And feels locked in, windows barred, ashes in the fireplace
His inheritance. Refuses to live for the plot’s sake,
Drops out of college and moves to LA,
Sunshine his second language now until he gets burned
By his girlfriend’s bonfire of blazing red hair.
Trapped in his shallow hell between her beauty and the door
He embraces his love affair with unrequited pain.
Knows the perfume she wears is so rare it has an unlisted number
And that she hardly ever catches her expression unawares
Because her reflection rarely strays out of the range of a mirror.
Is also familiar with the fact that her wet-dry-samurai-eyes
Bright as massacres are blank checks waiting to be filled in
And doesn’t care. Plays the fool in his own way
Each time she picks his twenty dollar bills like lettuce.
“Always we!” he cries. “O let me in!
To whom can I talk big if not to you?”
“Never me!” she replies as she gives him her famous
Let’s-get-this-comedy-over-with-look.
The next day discovers with surprise
That her vanishing has made his room more beautiful.
Decides that only the dead are nice
Until he meets his future wife
And suddenly hundreds of little butterflies
Flutter like tiny heart attacks in his chest
Each time she smiles him, her soul the bait,
His SOS the hook, her touch the necessary yes oh yes of it,
His happiness so compressed it keeps expanding into old age
And then too much increases into even more.
Wills his shaky hands to steady what’s left of it
In reverent benediction--as if it were a glass
Of very expensive wine--and so far hasn’t spilled a drop.
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