First

1.

Before we became known

we felt stretched free

catering sight to sight

where boredom roamed

dimly after school

but our friends they

told us where

to find ourselves

churched in right company

how our youth ached

sacredly to be joined

not to feel vestigial

binding in our prayers

that above all love

covers as a firmament

2.

The day unfolded with the leaves their blissful sweep

skirting the windows and their peeking classrooms

A friend rushing me in early, sweaty after tackling

religious seniors, that out-of-body ministry

but I kept my cool up the stairs and stood anew

in the parade of teenaged impulses

foreign to new faces and hands hit back, front

as an available guest of sorts who showed up

just in time

and I was shown where the games were stacked

corners marked their cliques and creeds

where people sang and sat to gossip about

friends of friends and long tales to pass the silence

But I was not to be ignored quietly as some homebody

passing through so idle and unknown

for that is what kids do, mask shun, isolate

and play to shorten the hours skipping in currents

as if in search of something, someone but always somewhere

takes them, and me as a kid

wanted to be like them, magnanimous

a tailor-made sail into the sun that enthralls

a heart to cast off its veins for the bold and wild

And I remember in beckoning to meet everybody

I saw you on your own behind glasses

and I spoke to lift you up to connect, reveal

what spilled out of us were oceans of laughter

to feel how your quiet lungs could stir up thunder

how your loud eyes shimmered in wonder

and would leap annoying waves a spritz of joy

the way you enchanted life with your smiles

how then my night doubled as a dream

even when I was liking, being liked under glimpsing moons

that within the isles of names yours stood brightest

never to be soiled washed up lost

3.

who knew how small each year would end slipping distorted long

like counting up sand their unfeasible theoretical agedness

but though we voyaged around curled about people and their calendars

we never did part far and away of a center

to be so grinded out of skin and breath as stratified bitter facts

because when I saw you again a wind blew past my eyes

relearning how the dream first came to be foretold and the first night that we met and the first glances we had from first Saturdays

that I stopped you by name midway from leaving and later called for you

bursting in certitude if it was you that stayed and stayed missing within me

and only then I found out how deeply etched you were

exploring inside a map of your body

after searching for someone

of something so young

sunken in all that time