A note of thanks 

The boy with blue eyes came to me

    One summer sunday

With a sky that perfectly matched his irises

    And playfully

Clashed with brambly red hair

    Forest fire

Smoke in the air just like

    today

The first person to tell me that my

    Armpit hair

Was beautiful, it was you

    Boy with blue eyes

And untameable vigor with a

    Bastard child like me

Left behind in the wake of your wild youth

    Who told me

My poems were worth reading

    It was you

Who first turned me on

    To existentialism and kerouac and

Ginsberg ginsberg ginsberg

    A sexually liberated hipster

Who would

    Only kiss me in private

Because your heart

    To someone else was committed

It was you

    Who wouldn’t smoke cigarettes

But let

    Tendrils of jazz smoke curl from your lips

That would twist

    Into literary musings and stories of gutters

And spain

    It was the boy with blue eyes

Who felt

    The same pain as I and

Told me

    That I wasn’t broken for my acrid emotions

In 40 ounce

    Confessionals during foggy-windowed escapades

On the rims

    Of gray industrial billings

It was you

    Who gifted me with your flesh

Only once

    On the day you broke your love pact

To another

    And left the next without goodbye

But a smear

    Of semen on my windshield long since dried

And only

    Wiped away when someone else complained about

The dirty glass

    It was you

Blue eyes who sidled through my conscience

    Only when

It was most inconvenient with words

    In prose

Expressing a gratitude for me that you never

    Had the nerveTo say to my face

Blue eyed boyFormer undercover lover

    Whose spell

Was finally broken when I saw you

    Happy

In the arms of another at some

    Punk show

I high on mushrooms and you on your own

    Success

I digress, blue eyed boy

    I will proudly

Wear the mark of our brief trysts into

    Infidelity

On my barb-wire wrapped heart

    And I am

Indebted to you for forcing me to start

    Writing my stories

And showing me that we’re all just the universe’s

    Trash

And that’s okay, blue eyed boy

    PleaseDo not forget me

 

Pioneer Square, 2017