poem of the day 12.03.12

what more?

i mistook her name as manna

like the fine frost of sustenance

that fed the biblical exodus

but her name was mara and she was sixteen

i was so damned bad with women

a nineteen year-old virgin

i could barely hold her hand as we strolled

to her neighbor’s farm to watch horses

i kept thinking how her old man

had pulled me aside and said,

remember that mara is only sixteen

like i could forget

and when she kissed me it was a soft miracle

but i had to let it go

because i was nineteen

and i knew there’d be moments

where i didn’t want to remember

that she was only sixteen years-old

months later, i met katie

we were the same age

but she had all the experience that i didn’t

only she liked me and she kissed me

and she let me do things to her

that i’d been dreaming and reading about for years

things i couldn’t do to a sixteen year-old

but i didn’t like the look in katie’s eyes

after she’d taken my virginity

there was a pride and self-satisfaction there

that i could never reconcile with my own ego

so when katie started mentioning her boyfriends

on nights after we’d have sex

or had just gone down on each other

i’d mention mara

and soft summer nights under pittsburgh skies

innocent kisses in fields with horses

i made her into more than she was

i made her into the great romance of my youth

instead of some sixteen year-old girl

whom i never gave a reason to and never called back

but it was enough to piss off katie

and whenever we’d fight

or i wasn’t being the good boyfriend in her eyes

she’d spit at me

why don’t you go back to your mara then?

go back to her if i’m not good enough for you

it was so silly but she was

the one small arsenal of assault that i had

against the deluge of katie’s history of sex

and on those lonely drives home

where i wanted to escape katie

and the rest of the people that i knew

i’d sometimes think about mara

and that innocence that i tossed aside

how it was probably

a fake innocence anyway

something that i just made up

to keep myself from happiness

that she was probably somewhere out there

another nineteen year-old with her

looking at horses and making out

wanting more

getting more

and it would be no big deal

between them.