I spent an hour or so searching through old journals'
my middle school years
where like a crab I grew into the shells of pimples,
puberty, and mainstream rock'
and found my first attempts at poetry.

It was like rediscovering a small tropical island,
the words milling about the coastline, erecting SOS
signals of angsty clichés and four-letter obscenities.
Some words like manifesto I must have
looted from the crowded jungles of a thesaurus,
others like death and grief had floated
to the island in the throats of thunderclaps,
and abstracts like love had washed ashore sealed
tightly in a bottle of not-even-close from a first girlfriend.

The letters marched stupidly across the page
like refugees in hopes of returning to the dark hull of a shipwrecked pen,
embarrassingly permanent on the pale margins.
Ashes from dead fires. Abandoned passions. Forgotten
anxieties in lieu of blacker winds.

I remembered the effort I had exerted on the last poem of
the anthology: a girl's likeness to a star in the darkness of space.
I recall wishing to recite it to her as she picked up the phone,
and in Shakespearean charm I answered her greeting:
Hey.
(pause to muster twelve-year-old heroics)
wh- uh'¦.
sorry. What are you doing?

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