a lost pussy pome



Cast out in a drought
once-white, dirt-ridden t-shirt
drenched, heavied w/sweat

at a gas station
on the old Lincoln Hwy
diesel fumes wafting

into newly cooled
Indian Summer evening
in W. Ohio

In my 18th year
having just lost my cherry
to long-legg’d Katie

from Hardin County,
where dog races draw a crowd.
We leave ourselves there

& I hit the road
Petty singing on cassette
“Runnin’ Down a Dream”

or running away
from that Virgo sun gone down
into the flatness

into the moonrise
I drive, sort of mariner,
from that bridge-burning.

I write her song &
record it on Tim’s 4-track
& get good & drunk

on homemade cherry
wine, purchased by my mother
on the Erie shore

years or more before.
I begin my Sr. year
in September, brood.

Katie schools down South
in New Orleans or Athens,
or Austin, maybe ...

I construct a poem
in college, call it “first sex”
or something like that

written in a rush
& under the influence
of marijuana

for Thayler's’s workshop
my 2nd yr. in Bowling
Green & Carl likes it

so I decide to
become a poet that day
(& to smoke more pot).

The poem finds its way
into some little journal.
I get over her.

-- sed March '05