No Regrets

AP classes filled with rising celebrities, whose ways promised most?

Girls organized, focused, and stuck in the ways of influencers-

Attached to waning boys who only knew tomorrow’s release.

On the benches frantically watching friends score and

Rising stars earn tokens to the future, I focused on one test,

Just one thing to tend so I could launch myself into one heart.

I walk past her like a mirror, only catching a brief glance

Each time I passed by followed by a cold shiver

Almost as if I fell right into arctic waters.

I talk to her from a distant fearful of any breath

Moving her away from my fantasies of movie theatres

And red dresses- space age fins, baby blue with chrome finish,

Burning tire smoke, toxic exhaust, this 1950s

Dead love, singing and dancing in the rain stuff,

A teenage boy’s malaise born imagination- a strange drug.

I run wild in sunflower meadows knowing the sun

Will never be greyed out, Working sweet and sour nights

Waiting for the moment I would hold her soft pale hand.

Restraint a million and one, burning esophagus,

Lonesome weekends with you in my head,

Nothing but you....

Printer page walls covered in thumbtack tracks

Friendships hung, false opportunities fashioned, birthdays past,

No ink could replicate my drywall phases, not even the next inhabitant.