Remember first love? Falling and flailing in it?
So brutal a thrill ride, and this heart its skiff—
come on, you know the song—sing with a minute—

where smacked on a granite sea, we bare and grin it?
Time’s passing the booze again. Come, take a whiff.
Memory of love outpretties the being in it,

as any idiot knows. Hound dog then linnet,
that’s the bestiary: what once howled croons a riff.
Come on, you know this song! Croon with a minute.

A white dress sprawls in candlelight. On the spinet,
wax spatters the hardwood casing and pools stiff…
Memory of love, outprettying being in it,

refines some bits (that hair—when to unpin it;
sweat pants; the moog), but come on, they’re periph-
eral—not the real song of us! Any minute, 

our seized, spent day, so small and so infinite,
will unseal from spilled light, heat, and wax, as if
memory of love might still bear time’s breath in it.
Weren’t their crooned come-on to us now, this minute.
                        

As a teen, I was timid and snarky.
Decent at sports. Good with words.
I wrote poems: angst and malarkey.
I had a few friends. Goofs and nerds—

who, like me, liked keeping things jolly,
but so low-key no one else saw.
Our jokes were so inbred, our folly
so private, we rubbed our hearts raw.

A girl crashed a club that we founded,
the Nonsense Verse Nuts. She wrote verse
as prickly as ours. Charmed, confounded,
I tailed her home, sly as a hearse.

With a wry kind of mocking compassion,   
she asked me in. Poured some vermouth.
We kissed, in a neophyte fashion.
An earring came off in my mouth.

My first ear! I cut my tongue on it;
I coughed blood. She smothered a laugh.
I wrote her an ode and a sonnet.
I cringe, on her flummoxed behalf.

What an age! What an age ago! Somehow, 
I shook off—I ghosted!—that schnook.
Just a wish haunts the man I’ve become now
to lip the pearl. Tongue its wire hook.