PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

That particular day, I felt no expectation

that my perspective was to experience transformation

and simultaneously receive a validation,

and a little less of that sense of isolation;

and now this poem may propose a conversation

without old prudes' and enraged haters' vociferous derogation.

I do not think mere coincidence adjusted my line of

sight, or directed my gaze (usually myopic but, on

that afternoon, distinctly more accurate) diagonally

across the classroom at the exact moment when you slipped

your shoes off; and the beauty of your feet, sheathed in

midnight blue socks not entirely concealed by the wide

cuffs of the baggy bell-bottom jeans that covered your

slender legs.  And was it simply random chance by which

old Mrs. B---, who seemed to ancient that she must have

witnessed the founding of Rome, asked you to distribute

copies of the lecture's outline to your classmates.

Junior High was an institution of particularly rigid

social structure, with more axiomatic assumptions than a

Euclidean proof.  With your inherent beauty, shoulder-length

blonde curls (then considered radically defiant, and a

clear violation of the dress code in the Student Handbook),

athletic build and agile limbs---you belonged to the

unapproachable and exclusionary circle of the most popular

students; while I---clothed most unfashionably (my mother

controlled the selection of garments available to me),

awkwardly shy and clumsy, with a pipsqueak voice and an

almost compulsive inclination to literature that would, in

about two and a half years, tilt toward Poetry---belonged

among those to whom the appellations "nerd," "bookwork,"

"four-eyes," "faggot," and "fairy," were regularly

attached and declared by those by whom we were despised.

Yet, after gliding across the floor in the softness of those

shoeless, but still partly concealed socks, you smiled at me as

you handed me my copy of the outline; and our eyes met in a

kind of conjunction that seemed more intimately communicated than

our classmates might have understood, or even tolerated.

I thought the joy in your facial expression must have contained

three aspects:  the casual comfort of your shoelessness; the

tacitly subversive disregard of the exact specificities of the

school system's dress code (which had not been modified since the

year of our birth); and, perhaps, an acknowledgement (and, dared

I hope, an appreciation?) of my own, hitherto suppressed desires,

now liberated and stirred by your seemingly celebratory footsteps.

I think you even lingered for a little bit, as if sharing this

encounter with me, and none other in that room, that building

(designated the "West"), or the entire campus.  Did you know

that my dreams, later that night, would become your own domain in

which no shoes could impede you, and my favorite radio music

accompanied your uninhibited and eager frolic therein, and that

those slumbertime visions would not longer be dry-as-dust . . .

not dry at all . . . .

Starward

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