Have I ever

five years ago we went with my family to the movie theater
and didn't sit with them, but that didn't mean I wanted
your tongue down my throat in the same room that contained
the person who dictated my life completely .
Kissing you gave me butterflies, a rapid pulse,
and this awful, sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Five years later kissing means nothing, or really, it means too many things
that are too meaningless. kissing means you are drunk, it means you are bored,
it means you are doing more promiscuous things--
but it doesn't mean you care for someone
or even that you have any particular desire to be kissing them.

Five years later the butterflies you get when mouths mesh still occasionally
make an appearance, but on different occasions, like when you are so drunk
that you are vomiting on yourself and he undresses you and helps you take a shower.
Or when someone says you are gorgeous and it doesn't translate directly into
'sleep with me.' Those butterflies soar when you get the right grades or
meet the right guy or take the right drugs.

That awful stomach churning is still present too,
it erupts when you lose hope, lose the right guy,
and take the wrong drugs. you feel noxious when you realize someone is
the right one for you but you are all wrong for them, when
you've lost too much and attempt to cope with a pill or powder, you lose your lunch
when you break apart behind the wheel or attempt to settle your stomach
with alcohol, when you realize that you don't even have an appetite anymore,
when you stop eating and stop living, when you bum a cigarette from a fifty-four
year old black man with a half-toothed smile and muddy pants seventy-two hours
after you've quit and you decide to stop quitting,
you get sick when you realize that you are really really sick.


Five years ago I snuck out only when it was absolutely dark and walked miles away
from prison and wondered how things would change.
From fist fights in a Hispanic neighborhood and hickeys from that boy
who was too old to be a boy,
to best friends who steal credit cards and weave stories more often than
the truth, to speeding tickets you didn't mean to get,
to hangovers and the wrong drugs and bad judgment.
I have my answer.