the first poems i ever wrote were to impress a girl
she was big-eyed and blonde-haired and
she had just returned
tanned and confident from burning man.

(i would later learn this person was not my type,
but when you’re fresh-faced and hot-blooded
and hard as a steel penny
there is no such thing.)

she was crunchy and fleshy and
lifted me up toward the sun,
like she was showing god this strange dark ugly little creature she had found,
when i so desperately wanted to dwell,
meaningfully and coolly,
in a deep jagged crack in the floor of a filthy dive bar bathroom 
filled with xanax powder and piss and shit.

i wrote a whole book of poems for her
(at least fifty poems in total, probably more)
and she threw it away
(a good call, kudos to her)
and fell back into the arms of another
slightly-less-stupid boy
who treated her more like a person
and less like an unearthly spirit goddess who washed into my life one day
and gave kisses that were too wet
her tongue like a fluttering butterfly in my mouth
and her pudgy hands grabbing at me
with all the ferocity she could muster
all the tenderness in the world
since she’d never really had to work
or break herself to survive.

i realize only now
looking back as an older man
(who has no business with youth
except as a regular visitor in an art gallery)
that this was what i loved about her.

she leafed through the poems i’d written for her in a cafe near the college she attended
not knowing they were all for her
poems i had furiously scribbled overnight
chain-smoking cheap Chinese cigarettes from a soft-pack
and taking pauses only to remember what her breath smelled like
(apricots and salt and copper)
and delve into pornographic fantasies
where i was the star and she was the scenery.
i used thirteen different pens and frenetic cursive and random punctuation
because she told me her favorite poem was Howl
and i could be her ginsberg.

now I write on a laptop
and barely press the keys
and there aren’t quite so many doodles
(there are none)
of tits and hips and lips in the margins.

she lied and said they were good
(i can’t recall what any of them were about)
the first few thousand words that had to be pushed out
the first raw and distorted inklings of meaning
from the push-pop of my empty little head.
but i knew
they were drivel and i hated them instantly
almost as much as i hate what I write now
with genuine ache and longing behind it.

everything i write now is hooked up
to an endless reservoir of acid and agony
and tears of regret
churning and turbulent
simmering
a roiling fracas
just below my eyeballs.