High school love poetry I don't hate.

I've decided to cut the snark for a moment and post a few poems that don't make me cringe when I read them. Most of them are just moments or impressions, maybe inspired by reality but existing mostly in my head. They're all about love and connection, because that's pretty much all I wrote about for the last few years of high school.


Road Trip

Take me farther
down the
road
till we can’t see behind
us, and you
are all that fills the cornfield
in my head.
Through the singing
of the tires and the wind
in the trees,
take me under this orange sky
and bless me.

1/16/03


Suspension of Gravity

Unlike the serious diamond
on my finger, or the mountains
that we now watch
cover the sun (represented
by the tiny lumps on paper and cardboard
that hang in your expensively private study:
this is where you're going, this is where you've been),
you are not solid.
Any moment now, I fear that you will disappear
in an explosion of stars and light:
leaving me with no anchor,
nothing to hold me to the descending earth.

(2004)


Sway

I wandered back behind the parking lot,
through the maze of pine and cedars,
trying to emulate the air-
which seemed so crisp, articulate. You were in
the dance hall, shiny in your quick clean
shoes: and your movements
swayed the trees straight up to the highest
branches. It grew colder. I leaned into
the ground and watched their needles weave
a pattern across the moon, thinking of you.

(2004)


Happenstance

You are beautiful,
but I do not know you.
Only after the passing of this
will I first clearly be able to see
the whole of you,
darling:

(Beyond your quick, deft
hands; your skillful words and
interwoven silences;

your ever-present sweet-
expensive smell, which mingles
with that of the honeysuckle
vines of my childhood
memories.)

(2004)