A Single Metaphor is Dangerous For its Capacity to Inspire Love- Kundera:

Those were the last of the good days, before the leaves withered to bare black hands

all shriveled and bony like oldpeople’s, the wisps of laughter echoing under the bridge, lighting a joint

with the promise of exodus from the four-year fascists, he pisses away his last fuck

into the river’s gurgling underbelly, while she tries not to look because he’s a boy,

but they joke that she’s the man. As the church bells tell them it’s time to go home their lopsided poetry

unfurls into the quiet dying sun diffusing its stifling sleepiness, and she tries not to fall

climbing up through the town’s pale disarray, its fault-lined asphalt, like they did that first fall. 

Way back before the weeds of self-conscious high school hierarchies creeped underhand,

their mishmashed group of misfits galavanted through the then-new backlit streets: him- the poet-

the socialite, the athlete, the weirdo, the Aryan wet dream. He, the floppyheaded Moses conducting their disjointed

meanderings, promising that their destination was “in a straight line,” but they still broke into a boy’s

school and jumped over its fence into the stream of decrepit cars crawling along yelling “fuck fuck fuck.”

He was in the gym bathroom washing off the muck of commiserated school spirit when she was fucking

around with the older boys. She lost him at that first pep rally, and their literal graveyard rendezvous fell

on the day after the night she paid for dinner on her first date with the limp salad of a senior boyfriend

that would hang over her for the next three years, holding her with his lumberjack hands

while she deluded herself that she wouldn’t sooner rather shave off all her hair and join

a lesbian Satanic cult because in his head he held sawdust and in her heart she housed a poem. 

Her boyfriend didn’t appreciate art or glimmering language or quality procedural cop shows. It was poetic

irony that he was as poor as he was simple, the essence of small-town indolence with pipe dreams to fuck

and marry exotic women in China and trade stocks, even though he was twenty and still couldn’t join

the uppercrust crowds at brunch when they were in the City because he wore ratty cargo shorts falling

awkwardly past his knees. Still, she smiled when they were with his parents and held his hand

when they were wrapped up in each other and a dog blanket on his moldy denim couch, but boy,

that maelstrom of resentment bubbling in her chest only swelled and her gaze wandered over other boys.

When her boyfriend left her a Dear John voicemail, he was back: her knight in disheveled plaid, her poet.

And somewhere between swapping secrets in the shadows of the brick buildings and prying his hands

off of his Vietnam youth hat locked in their custody tug-of-war, she forgot to cry and give a fuck

that she’d been dumped three days before her three day anniversary, and this was the first fall

that she’d been alone, but she’d trade all the roses and sports fleeces and her ex-boyfriend’s car to join

him in the bizarre boarding school mating ritual of a walk back. Her roommate in the adjoining

room convened surreptitious plans for an intervention whenever she snuck off to the boy’s

dorms to crash on his couch with questionably sanitary Chinese takeout and it was so easy to fall

into a trance watching American Psycho and a Clockwork Orange while they read Miltonic poetry

and discussed how they’d be homies with Satan. And when things got all fucked up 

in the good of the last days she carried the memory of them metaphorically- platonically-holding hands

bobbing and weaving through the City’s skyscraper labyrinth to join her friends who have no sense of poetry,

when she’d really rather be with this boy, swallowed up by his gravity, his easy grace, his blasé art of not-giving-a-fuck, 

with a cigarette falling from his fingers while she cradled his lighter in her hand.