The Important Things(a poem)
The second best part of fucking her was the way her scent would leak into my skin and stay with me the rest of the day…It’s been five years but I remember every line on her hand and every freckle on her nose and every direction the muscles on her thighs moved when I pressed my fingers against them, pressing until she moaned and until she whispered those magic words over and over again…I’m yours, she says…I’m yours, yours, yours…I remember exactly how her teeth felt, carving into my lower lip as I’d pull back slightly while we kissed, my skin stretched and clasped and punctured from the sharp edges of bone she brushed and flossed four times a day…
when I was seventeen me and Harriet would do coke off the black hardcover book of Edgar Allen Poe’s complete works and wonder to one another if Kurt Cobain really killed himself or if Courtney had him killed…the blow came from this 27 year old bartender my 19 year old sister was sleeping with while her boyfriend was in Ecuador for a year doing missionary work…Harriet was super cute and her tits were nice and she had these handcuffs she found in her aunt’s bedroom and stole one afternoon and she would let me lock her up wherever I wanted too and do what I wanted which usually ended up being whatever I saw happening in the porno movies we always watched why we were doing it and when we weren’t doing it…me and her, we watched a lot of porn together that spring…the summer before, after Harriet’s grandma died and her mom and dad separated and she all of the sudden hated being around either of them as they tried peeling away those twenty years of comfort and normal with trendy haircuts just like the ones made famous by primetime sitcom stars and gender friendly social clubs that convened one night a week with vague dreams of inflatable passion and a second chance at doing something so interesting that someone might ask them about it one day or acquaintances from town might talk about it without them being present…on the hottest day in four years in the middle of that August, stuck on her father’s farm and unable to get a hold of me to drive to her and save her from a kind of fierce boredom which only blossom’s that ugly in the middle of nowhere, years before the internet and during a time when satellite cable dishes were just starting to surface in places still too rural for paved roads, Harriet tried to order a pair of silk pajamas and the red nighty Nikki Taylor was barely wearing from Victoria Secrets over the phone but the voice on the other end hung up after Harriet finally admitted she only had a two dollar bill and a Bazooka Joe comic strip in the pocket of a pair of shorts that were in a duffel bag in her father’s car so she threw a rock from the driveway as hard as she could at the television in the kitchen then drank a fifth of Southern Comfort as she listened to Pulp on her headphones and cut her wrists after lighting a hundred candles in the bathroom…
Even though I can remember the specific places on her back that would make her gasp and her body dance when my fingers crossed them, tracing her sweet, honey skin while we laid in her bed after fucking and even though I can remember exactly how hard and far inside of her pussy to slide my fingers to make her eyes roll all the way back inside her head, I couldn’t tell you her middle name if you asked me and I don’t remember the names of her brothers or sisters or where she was born since it was different than where she moved here from…I’m scared of getting to a place where dinner out becomes something planned, something we only do on Saturday night, I’m scared of existing in a place where long bouts of silence fill the space between questions about how our days were and a story about the copy machine at work…What is it about us that makes us seek our eventual misery, that makes us chase our own confinement…What is it about us that that’s so eager to stop exploring and discovering and experiencing…
When Harriet was 20, she called me and told me she was pregnant, she told me she didn’t know what to do, she told me she loved the guy who banged her into motherhood…He’d once been a star football player in high school who dreamed of fall Saturday’s in a stadium and 70,000 people cheering for him…His last dreams…The one that never came true…Harriet once dreamed of California and London, she once dreamed of being so far away from home that she’d forget she ever lived there…
On Facebook and Twitter, the details of the new war are plastered all over my timelines…Blistering words that drip with anger as me and the rest of their friends are treated to a front row seat of the 21st Centuries new theater-the social media breakup-I watch all this so-called stability and security unravel into a lose thread of deceit, days without any passion, late nights with a missing person, and the confirmation that the last few years were nothing more than a huge mistake…instead of I love you, it’s you’re a whore, it’s you’re a motherfucker, it’s you don’t fuck me anymore, and it’s you guys were right the whole time…When she walked out of my door that last time five years ago, I felt alright about everything, I even felt relief…In my mouth was the final strand of her hair that would ever get stuck in it…I tasted it then slowly pulled it out and inhaled her scent a final time…It’s better this way, it really is…I’d rather miss you than hate you, I’d rather remember the laughing and fucking than the lying and the screaming…
A year ago, on Harriet’s daughter’s 12th birthday, she told me she wouldn’t do anything differently, she said she wouldn’t trade this life for any other life…I didn’t believe her but I understood that’s what you’re supposed to say, I understand the willingness to accept when the only other option is misery…And I hung up the phone and grabbed a beer from the fridge and walked out on my back deck just in time to watch the sun set beneath the golden gate bridge…
The first best thing about fucking her was how present we both were, how we were both there and only there, and we communicated perfectly and we made sure we took care of each other’s wants and needs…It’s the important stuff that I always remember cos those are the things that lead to both of us being happy, the only thing that will ever fucking matter…The only thing that’s worth a goddamn thing when it’s all said and done and we’ve all moved on…












