August's Adolescent Love

With the keys to my father’s car

I exit my familial kingdom through bedroom window

My cold bare feet tickled by the grass

Who’s long damp blades rise like the swords of a domestic militia

As if to dissaude me from treading forth into the darkness

But they like the apprehension manifest

In the slow-then-rapid bubbling pulsations of my youthful heart

Do little to break my steely resolve

“I’m going to see her tonight,”

I metronomically whisper under my breath

While struggling to pacificy the electric adrenal sensation

That shakes my skinny legs and quickens my breaths

In the chilly aromatic winds of August’s early morn.

“I’m going to see her tonight,”

These six simple words slip my tongue unconsciously

Yet prompt the tide of a newly genesis’d courage

While I tread the length of the yard

To enter my mechanical chariot

Of tragically transient teenaged affection.

With an expedite twist of the ignition

The engine undesirably roars to life

Threatening to wake my biologically elect

From their restorative slumber

And knocking my heart from its temporal refuge

At the precipice above the harrowing depths of my stomach.

A second explodes through millennia

And I wait and wait

Anticipating the martyrdom of love

At the hands of those whose love made me.

But the universe that shines fortune on such puristic agenda

Grants me an amnesty of passion

So I pilot my vehicle North

Guided by the magnetic pull of her strange and beautiful soul.

“I’m going to see her tonight,”

Such repetition draws the life from words

But not these

They feed on their succinct resonance

Growing rotund and full and hearty

Threatening to burst and wash the world around me

In the colorful life-blood of first-love

As I park at the end of her street in the dim camoflague of the sunless hour

Then silently enter her home

Through the side-door she left unlocked in expectation of my arrival

“I’m going to see her tonight,”

I whisper as verbal ellipsis

While I pause to survery the house absent of its waking patriarch

Before my final and most crucial task.

“I’m going to see her tonight,”

Though this time I speak nothing aloud

As I slowly breach the threshold of her bedroom

And am welcomed by a smile that paints

My words into the space enclosing our bodies’

Palace of retreat.