Eighteen


I stood watching
as you crossed the street
               for the last time.
Trying hard to memorize you.
Knowing it would be important.
The way you walked,
the way you looked back over you shoulder at me.

Years later
I would hear the singing of the wind
and the day's singing would come back.
That time of going would return to me
every sun-gray day.
April or August it would be the same
       for years to come.

Man has not made the kind of bromide
that would let me sleep without your memory
or written erotically enough
to erase the excitement of just your hands.

These long years later it is worse
for I remember what it was
as well as what it might have been.


Street
"Eighteen" talks about (what I call) one of life's soul hauntings. You know, that moment in time where you realize all will change, or you realize all has changed. You want to remember, but yet you want to forget. And so that desire to understand, to relive the moment, keeps coming back.