The arms around me are so close

and I can smell the delicate squirt of perfume

that lingers around you as you invite me

to remain the fifteen year old boy

who was in love with you

and who thirty years later still crumbles

and goes weak at the knees when I think of love

as pure deliverance and a teenage angst poem

dedicated to you, unseen

hidden in the pages of a diary in which your name

appears scrawled over and over again.

 

With our youth all around us,