girl with the green jacket

(aka a dozen ways to begin the unfinished poem I’m writing about you)

you rejected my moonlight melodrama
and asked for
something substantial
—because like
when buying candy from the machine
your decisions are based “a great deal
on grammage”

like lightning
in a desert
(and subtle too)
was how you electrified me;
after one week of
the knowledge that you
existed
I was upside down

and you were too
leaving for Australia, or some rot like that
I knocked on your door
but it was locked and
I was on the bottom of the world so
I wrote you
the sweetest letter you ever received in your life
but you waited too long
to let me know that;

because on the seventh day
after making a fool of
myself
I did something even stupider
I shacked up with
the first siren who looked at me twice
—that’s what rejection does to you
and man does it ever
rot your gut—
but I guess things
happen that way

and when you reappeared in fall
I wanted to jump over the railing
to show you
what I was all about

—but seconds later
I was sipping coffee
and reading my books
so for years I
wrote drivel
and
packaged it as
decoy-cool
but you didn’t bite
you funny fish.

I wish you had seen me that day with my cap and gown
because
I wanted you to be proud of me
for just a minute, just once
though we are basically
strangers;

I wish my dad owned a library too
then I could've read up
on what makes you tick

but like that moonlight hello on
my doorstep
this poem of ours never happened—

it's nobody's fault but
it never got
written,
and
for that at least
I'll take the blame