30 Poems in 30 Days: Day One

From Start to Finish 

It started with a note, you said you’d be my friend

Even if the other girls thought you were a bitch and wouldn’t

associate with you. It was Jr. High, eighth grade,

and I was high on a last year’s friendship

With the first girl who ever found me cool.

I said yes; I deserved a new friend.

Only you could understand me like you do.

Those years we never attached

at the hip, just the heart.

Time and distance could never break it.

We married two weeks apart, and years later

divorced in tandem, though miles and lives apart.

And now, we’re married to Engineers,

both from foreign lands: still in synch.

At the finish, you will still be the girl I loved

In green converse, that ex-axe-murdering Michael Jackson impersonator

renegade cowboy, R.P. Johnson,

And I will be the boy-crazy poet,

my Chucks mustard yellow, grunge before grunge was cool:

Wild-eyed pornographic jazzman, P.C. Smith.

At the finish, I pray, we will be old old ladies.

I dream we will rock on the porch and watch your grandchildren

Nurse their babies, and still, over all the years, and loves and loss,

have so much more to talk about,

So much laughter to share.

And …the last poem I read:

A Word to Husbands