First Love.

If Time is a war crime then the evidence

Lies not in what it does to our bodies,

But how it slaughters our minds.

Memories pile on top of each other like

Bodies in a pit caked with dirt and lime.

Maybe that is what dementia is:

Simply having seen too much of this?

We search in vain for survivors,

Among them our "first love",

A foothold in the darkness

We strive in vain to climb out of.

Who was this person that made us,

Formed us from rough clay

With a touch, a look, a kiss,

Acts so pure and true

They haunt us until the last

Light of consciousness blinks out?

We imbue them with a power

They could never hold in life,

A might born of the weight of years

And our own need to feel

That all this living was not in vain.

I close my eyes and see her:

Skinny and bright eyed in a short dress,

Us facing each other, chests heaving

After an arduous chase through

A schoolyard full of children running

From whatever was chasing them,

The two of us ending up in the boys toilets,

Her face a luminous dial of excitement,

The thrill of the forbidden visible

In her twitching fingertips as she

Bounced on her toes and searched

For an escape from the kiss she knew

Was coming, my heart thrumming

Inside my chest like an insane drum

As I moved in, my head light as if hit

By a fist of pure need to put my lips

Against her lips and have that thing

That was her: her trembling, her sweat,

The hair on her arms, the dip between

Where her nose ended and her mouth began...

She dodged me and ran,

But that sensation sunk its hot iron

Into the fleshy pulp of my young self

And branded me a romantic, one doomed

To search for this moment again and again,

Until my last breath leaves me cold

And insensate as a stone.

But I will not be alone,

For memory is as vital as oxygen

And I will dig with bare bloody hands

Until I drag my first love from her grave,

So we can once again stand as we did

And know what it means to live.

© shaun patrick green 2018