I would have stood upon the mount and given her a wicker-weave-wedding-ring.
That’s not exactly true. It was her grandmother’s engagement ring, and I had plans to conspire with her mother to get it re-sized for her fingers. She always said family was important to her.
Smile like too-green-days, ‘n smell like spring-in-bloom.
She was five foot two, b-cup (grew to a c-cup by the time we broke up), strawberry blonde (with an occasional dye to brunette, or maybe a highlight of pink), and the first time I saw her she was wearing a skin tight Invader Zim t-shirt, one with Gir on it.
She took my oaken bones ‘n worked the grit out of ‘em
Context is everything. I moved to Arkansas exactly one month after asking out this young woman who ran the soundboard to my lightboard in an Olathe North High School production of A. R. Gurney’s The Dining Room.
Our relationship was a little–accelerated. I found out I was leaving the night I worked up the guts to ask her on a date.
She kissed me, Modest Mouse playin’ “Float On” in the background, first I ever heard of ‘em, first I ever had.
No sex ‘til marriage, but a good grind up against never hurt no one.
You may not like hearing this from me, but hormones make you stupid. First time someone willingly up and rubs themselves against your private bits with your permission, it isn’t hard to mistake that for love. So here I was, no friends, a liberal in the conservative South, trying to figure out a way to get over the first “love of my life”.
This is ultimately about honesty, so let’s be honest. I’m a breast and ass kind of man. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stare at you, but I like curvy women and petite chiseled men. Those aren’t what I look for in a partner, but to put it another way, that’s the kind of porn I go for, and those are two very different things.
So that said, a b-cup on a five-foot-two woman in a skin tight shirt, it was enough to get sixteen year old me to take a second glance, and a third, and any I could get away with while not being a total creep.
Smile like too-green-days, ‘n smell like spring-in-bloom.
The problem with objectification is that in most cases it doesn’t feel like a bad thing at all. For every case of someone treating someone else like a piece of meat, there’s a few cases of someone mistaking exaggeration for reality, of building a fantasy instead of accepting someone for their perks and flaws.
She was a spark for the fire of me.
You love someone, so why wouldn’t you look only at the best of them?
I knew her for a good year or so before we dated, and we dated for about a year and a half. I helped her through hard times, and she helped me. Her parents liked me, and the only time her father ever said something to me in a stern tone was after he saved my ass from going to jail for statutory rape (the police didn’t believe she was born only ten days after me when I had her in a park, her panties off, my head between her thighs; her height, they swore she was fifteen to my eighteen.)
I did love her, but I cared more about the poetry I saw in her than I did in the flesh-and-flaws of her existence.
To date, I’ve written hundreds of poems about her, three plays, a novella, and essay after essay has her as a tertiary character. At one point I sold a poetry book that was nothing but poems about her, and it was large enough that my good friend A. M. Nystrom has a perfect bound print copy of it (some 100 plus pages 6×9”). Had me autograph it like it was going to be worth something some day.
I’ve said more ‘bout you than I said to you.
I started this summer writing a piece about love, so I figured with my college going back into session tomorrow, without me, I might as well end the summer with a piece about love, or about how we perceive love.
At the Foot of Diablo is a novella I started writing in an attempt to memorialize a woman I care for deeply. It was an attempt to do for her what I did for the woman I almost married.
My love for this woman is unrequited, in a way. She cares for me immensely, but it was those nights we stayed up late talking, cooking, or just being friends, that she loved more than anything.
For a very long time I just wanted to have her. I wanted her to be mine.
Midway through writing what I was writing, I started to realize that what I needed wasn’t some perfectly beautiful thing to capture her attention; I needed a reality check of my position. I needed to examine and admit my flaws. I needed to realize those were the moments I loved too, and whether or not she slept with me, kissed me, dated me, or ever held my hand, none of that made a difference.
She was flawed because she wanted everything I did, but didn’t believe she could have it without ruining everything. She felt she ruined every relationship eventually, that she was a “man-eater”.
I was flawed because I didn’t respect her choice. I wanted more to the point that it did affect our friendship.
We live and learn.
There’s nothing wrong with a little poetic exaggeration, but there’s a difference between that and the truth of things.
If you ever love someone, you love them zits and scars and hair and freckles and fat and infidelity and speech impediment and selfishness and short-sightedness and aches and sickness and flatulence and closeted skeletons and stretch marks and unplanned pregnancies and weird midnight sleep sounds, or you don’t love all of them, only parts.
I’ve never loved all of someone.
One of the downsides of being a writer is that you tend to exaggerate a great deal.
Sometimes, you believe yourself.
She didn’t smell like spring, just the flowers of the bush outside her window she left open in the night air.
She wasn’t my spark; she was just smart, and beautiful, and completely incapable of dealing with the loss of our child, just as I was.
My friend is just my friend. She isn’t nicknames and long poems about how I’m going to save her from her sadness. That’s her fight.
I’m all sex ‘n understandin’,
bad habits ‘n perspectives.
I got passion to the finger tips,
‘n I ain’t against rentin’ ‘em out for the night.
I got no misconceptions as to perfection
I learned, I learned, that lesson.
So let’s you ‘n me make a little friction,
let poetry be poetry, ‘n accept our flaws.
