Toilet paper tree

In the 80's everyone was wearing a Swatch watch
and rockin' a Sony Sports Walkman.
I didn't obey schedules then.
I carried a poetry journal instead.
Nobody could hear my music either,
but it wasn't shock proof like the Sony.

In high school my English teacher
was also the football coach.
Mr. Morris would recite poetry
like he was doing drills, his veins
protruding on his tomato Red-neck-
"I am the Captain of my Soul!"

My first boyfriend was gay,
peers used to say I turned him that way.
We made a deal in the forest.
His parents wanted us to get married someday.
He lived in San Francisco,
before he died that May.

One afternoon cutting school I was
hitch-hiking to the beach, I got a ride
from a perverted old man who was also
drunk, but the roads wind-
so you couldn't tell he was swerving...
He took my journal and wallet.

I was broke without a journal.

Those poems were so young
they didn't have time to matter.
I found paper scraps with my words-
swimming, rivers, tears, bleeding
hanging on branches like toilet paper-
where the bus stops.

The leaves whispered, reciting them,
nobody heard but me.




Image of painting by Zygmunt Waliszewski (1897-1936), "The Toilet of Venus"[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.