poem of the day 07.12.13

virgin at work

everyone knew

that i was the virgin at work

because i was never with a girl

never talked about the girls that i was with

could never answer their questions about girls

because there were no girls

because i was the virgin at work

spending my weekends riding around suburban pittsburgh

with the other losers

searching for girls

trying to talk to girls who wouldn’t give me the time of day

but mostly drinking coffee in the eat’n’park

because i had nothing to offer a girl

maybe there was another virgin at the job

the one kid who could talk about nothing but baseball

even i knew a guy had to talk

about something other than baseball

to get in a girl’s panties

i just didn’t know what

still i was just nineteen

and i’d been working there since seventeen with no action

i felt like a leper in that retail store

full of college aged gigolos

the sales clerk men who talked about

eating out their girlfriends

or fucking downtown club chicks in bathrooms

men who had swagger in a way that i didn’t

mall magicians who could turn a coat sale

into a parking lot hook-up in a matter of minutes

hell, even my boss was getting his

going through a divorce and sleeping on his couch

he could still talk game

about all of the girls that he used to bang in college

plus we all knew that he’d been putting it

to the manager of nine west for months

but i was the virgin at work

you could smell it on me

you could tell by the way i stuttered

around the female clerks

fumbled everything in front of summer chick customers

in tank tops and shorts that rode their ass

all of that young shopping mall ass and i was rendered

mute and impotent

it seemed a ceaseless, lonely existence at that age

being the virgin at work

i even quit that job without having been laid

until two months later

when i fucked my first girlfriend on my bedroom floor

to a boyz ii men cd

that afternoon we took a trip to the mall

and i paraded her around the joint like the homecoming king

at a high school reunion

we hit the old store so that i could show her off

but they’d had a huge turn over in employees

even my old manager was gone

it was a brand new pack of faceless 17-22 year olds

some getting no loving like it had been for me

the others talking about all of the pussy

that they were sure to get

in between selling baseball caps and t-shirts

to gang members coming up from the city.