When you shoulder shimmied and pushed your bangs to the side, it felt like I lost my virginity to you.

Right then, I felt the strings of my heart begin to fray, like a gym class rope being climbed simultaneously by the two fattest kids in the eighth grade. Gah, it wasn’t just gravity, it was destiny!

Now I want to learn how to talk backwards so that I can take every “I love you” I ever gave to someone else back. Now I want to fill your apartment with hundreds of balloons full of with laughing gas because I know it’d make all the pain go away if I could just get a rise out of you. I guess it was the way you broke your graffiti cap way off on top of that hair – that hayseed, everywhere hair – or the way you cupped your mouth as you sang along, or maybe it was the fact that I was drunk on lonely and you were the prettiest 23 seconds of my day, but something had me thinking “Man, if her hips were selling God, I’d grab my wallet and find a church.”

Baby, you are a back porch pitcher of lemonade and, one of these days, I'm gonna take the afternoon and drink you in slow. The French have a word for people like you, but je nais sais pas so I’ll put it to you the only way I know how. Here goes: you make the sky look like Camden, New Jersey.

So, tell me, how are we getting drunk tonight? Let’s not bloat our livers on lonely this time – I can’t last another hangover like that. We could split this bottle of wine and wax on about Descartes for 30 or 40 seconds before we both run out of insightful things to say about Descartes OR we can get shattered off this bottle of gin and confess to each other the worst thing we ever did to someone else. I’ll go first: This one time, I loved a girl so wholly and completely that it murdered her. You see, I thought I took her breath away.

Turns out I was suffocating her.

It’s just that her cries for help sounded so much like moans in the bedroom for me to always stay that I never even noticed. My bad.

But, when I saw you, I heard a poet’s voice calling: pretty blonde girl. Pretty blonde girl who’s eyes are a thousand flowers. Pretty blonde girl who’s hair is a weekend in the park. Pretty blonde girl who welcomes the ebb of music, who opens herself completely to the bass and the movement, who taught me what it means to be amazing.

Me, silly poem boy who watches and says nothing. Silly poem boy who gets himself tangled in love too often. Silly poem boy who carves these words in some trite attempt to impress you, the words refusing to give him sleep. Silly poem boy who knows not your name nor anything that has brought you to this moment in time but silly poem boy who loves you like murder because he has a fucked up sense of opportunity.

Me, mountainmaker of molehills, immortalizer of the fleeting, agonizer of echoes through the thin walls. Each one of these arms is yours for the taking, you can have both if you want them, but you gotta take the heart that strings them together. It’s made from bubble wrap which is why I can’t stop playing with it.
Yeah, there are some parts of me that are overdue for polish, but it’s nothing your lipstick can’t fix. You, you are pewter – not so rare as to be sold precious but I need you carbon. Like ribbons on the maypole.

Know that I’m the type to let something like the ocean just roll by without so much as a thought but something like you makes me wanna stop and go for a dip – wallow in it, get my fingers wrinkly. And, if you love me back, then do it now, because one day it’s all going to be salt on the driveway. One day our pictures are going to look so old. One day they’re going to invent tiny nano-bots that permanently cure erectile dysfunction and people will be gettin’ down well into their 80’s and I want to share that with you.

That sun comes and goes every day and, sure, there are some days when I sleep late enough to miss both appearances, but I’ll be damned if I’m not going to enjoy the way you look when it’s coming down.

So let it shine.