"How to Write a Love Poem."
"Just today, telling a boy in juvie how to write a love poem,
I'm stammering over ideas of detail and unique,
trying to get him not to say happy or sparkling eyes,
but to talk about what is his love's, only hers and no one
else's.
Like how the first time I picked up something
from somewhere, a book, maybe a phone,
and on the train platform, you smack it
straight down out of my hand.
And we stare at each other dead faced for a millisecond
and then burst out laughing.
Like that, I tell him.
And he's cracking up.
He's dying in this jail, where he
doesn't know how soon he'll be out, even though he's just 18.
But right now, he's full belly doubled over.
And I describe it to him again.
And who knows what this beautiful tethered young man
has done to forfeit his life in this place?
But I remember again, as he pounds the fused
the plastic table, how I want sometimes secretly
to hold your head in my hands again and tell you
that a castle of a brownstone in Brooklyn is yours,
that we'll be sweet forever and make outlandish things
from fish and peppers.
And this time I'll mean it.
Except I don't tell the boy that part.
But he only needs the part where when I least expected,
you'll slap something out of my hands,
and we'll roll on the floor laughing.
And that's what I wanted to remember,
if you'll remember that too.
Except I worry you don't.
But the boy tells me still chuckling, his eyes glassy,
that he gets it.
'I get it,' he says, 'detail, I get it,
yeah,' and shows me the part he's already written to his
girl about how he's not mad that a new man is holding her,
and how she deserves that.
Because she's beautiful.
And if he was the new dude, he'd hold her too.
And he respects dude for knowing how deserving she is.
And I say, 'yeah, I get it like that.
You're on it.
You already know what to do.'"