I was sunk,
absolutely sunk and done for
when you yanked the sharpie out of my hand
& drew on my arm in the din of the party,

& though I put serious effort into pretending that my
heart wasn’t doing panic-laps around my brain,
squeezing me out of an already flagging emotional
control,
you could feel my bow buckle from
where you were standing

after all, I don’t have a clue who I was talking with
or what about,
teeth gleefully chattering & feeling
the initial waves of real affection,
of plunging & anxious
vulnerability

& when I looked down at my arm, my own
face still close enough to yours
to feel &
smell
the warm alcohol on your breath,
i saw that

you had written your name there
in a heart with an arrow,
as you would in grade school
goofy & earnest & nakedly obvious

& suddenly I couldn’t look at you
my very toes blushed & I swallowed
audibly, heart & brain following
one another down down down
buckled bow & all

_____________________

so hours later & with pie-eyes swooning,
I flopped down onto my bed dreaming about
adjectival joy &

the next morning I woke up in my clothes
& realized that your tattoo had
rubbed off onto my limp pillow in the night,
branding your name in backwards smudges
all over its face

& of course, in my boyish & artless way,
I wanted your name etched onto my whole room,
or jealously written dozens of times
in a grade-school notebook
in as many daft variations, serif & sans,
proudly gilded and offered up as proof
of something inchoate
& indelible

- such are the fearless
& only half-brave wishes of an idiot

_________________________________

& set in mirrored sharpie where I lay my head, it was your name
in your own drunk script, from an unrepeatable lie of a night,
that tortured me as you glacially rejected my
shy & clumsy advances & poorly conjured pretexts
for a kiss

& even now, as I try to strangle every last bit of you out of my head
& harden in proportion to the depth of my shame &
hapless, bruised inferiority

I still cannot even say that name of yours,
that name whose blurred shape pockmarks my favorite
pillowcase,
whose very sound leaves me sunk on a kitchen floor
in a house next to a football field
looking not for my brain, or heart now
but my dignity

07/30/2011

Posted on 07/30/2011
Copyright © 2024 Ryan Narce