Love Poem

I have a very dear friend that I met my first week of high school in Ms. Simon's sculpture class. Nicole Harris was a year older than me and and shared the work table next to me with another Nicole...Nicole McGill. When I first met Nicole Harris I hated the woman. She was mean and wicked, and I wanted to sculpt a house and drop it on her. Then steal her fierce ass shoes. She and Nicole lied to me and told me that they had the same Dad but different Moms. My gullible ass believed them. At the time, if you would have told me that that 16 years later that she and I would still be friends, or that I would spend more than one Thanksgiving and Christmas with her entire family, I would have sculpted a house and dropped it on you too. It wasn't until I was a sophomore that she and I became friends. We both competed on the speech team together. She was the shining star of the team, and, with all humility, I was the up and coming speech wiz at old Henry High. Over the next two years, we became closer, until, my junior year I realized two things: I was in love with Nicole Harris, and I did not want to have sex with her in any way. Before that point I knew I had attraction to guys but I wasn't sure if I did to girls. Nicole sealed the deal for me. I emotionally loved her, I physically wanted a guy from the soccer team. I was a big old mo.

That's the background behind my newest poem.


Love Poem
For Noodle

For her I used to write love poems
mornings spent before sunrise
stargazing
she was my Polaris
the magnetic north that drew
my spirit towards pen & paper
poetry was the only way to reconcile love without lust
desire to have and to be without desire to be with

For her I used to write love poems
I could not write for myself
I didn't believe love was for me
so I gave it to her
hastily scribbled odes & lines
wrapping her in soft folds of adolescent adoration
she awakened my self-awareness
as they crowned her homecoming queen
as they handed her roses
I sat in the bleechers
reached for poetic razors
surgical phrases
thrust into my thorassic cavity
with a reverant ripping
from across the crowded room silently
I handed her my heart
I offered her my pulse
begged her to take the poetry
take the pain
I begged her to tell me how I could love her but not want her
how poetry could be serrated t-cells sawing at my bones
how every day I committed suicide on paper
pulling tape worms from my gut
slamming their writhing bodies into tragic attempts to digest
the secret that stood between my cock
and my heart

-Brandon Lacy Campos
-Minneapolis, MN
-14 June 2008