Tuesday, December 3, 2013

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.

                                                

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