What they are is not there,

Tucked inside skinny paper plates. Are

They going to be gone so

Soon? Before they drink too many

Or they cry before the tictoc

Of their quick, adolescent clocks

Stop? Heralding to all, everywhere,

That though they will tell their telling

Tales, they are no longer people

Of endless dreams. They are not what

Memory-making feeds because toctic

Has come to them, first time,

Last time, nine o’clock, it,

The cold, geriatric witching hour, is

Listlessly arriving in order for

Them to meet the aging tictic

Body-craved curfew, came at that instance

When they swore that to have five

Was not even the starting toc

To their toctic night, where minutes

Were slurring together so that only a toc

Felt as though it was far past

The means to down, to force, a number six,

The means to reach that solitary tic.

She, sprawled across a down-covered box spring,

Pinches here, pinches there, where there is

Tastelessly lumped flesh, not her, not

The mini-skirt and tank-top, carb regulated

Form. But he comes anyway and

Makes her shift to the right and the bed does

This ship-deck screech, not her, not

Like it was before, where now, later, to get,

Crawling and mascara-stained, out

Of the searching crowd below, out of

The boom-booming waiting, placed order

Of seeking, but never touching, intoxication nor

A lost-in-translation moment between do

And don’t. Ten-year-old music, its

Nostalgic fingers have calloused hands

With patches of hair collected beside a

Line of ink-stained, paper-cut, bit little

Nails. His attempts, feeble, caresses, jerking

Rather than soft. You should move, move

To the left, he says. They’ve gotten over

Romance and play love like color-by-numbers.

No use in taking this charade slowly.

Wish it was that one guy, three years. We

Were not so tattered then. We do

Not have the stamina to jump, not

Have the hope to even try to wind

Ourselves up: Jack-in-the-box. It

Will do its job. It will get us up

Enough to look as though we relived it

But there is that man, not boy, who has

No drink, no lacy sweat beads, no

Organization on the ledges of his hand, weights

Of waiting weighing way down to springs

Of break, where car horns and rubber-burned wheels

Because of the soundtrack to the dance of inside
Circles, not circles of trust, circles of

Using and usability, and the feeling of its

Sweet, slobbery promises against the slender

Curve of a nameless girl. Drowning in self

And the loss of it. But now there is no

Slender, bottle-fed Barbie, no, indeed

All of the faces looking like those stalagmites of

Lessons unheard when moments were too dear

To waste with legs trapped underneath a learner of nothing.

But was the rush he felt, release of

Inhibition, the endless dazedness, the

Cataclysmic wanderings, made of the kind

Of joy he thought he’d never find again? So,

He leaves his coat and lunges himself back to when

The bass didn’t give migraines and a kiss

Did not wait to come only from one Spring

To the next, when a girl that, to you, comes

Comes as no surprise and thoughts of “we’ll

Never meet again” is followed by a hot wet kiss.

But he looks around, at all he sees, each

Has pencil-colored mouth, and lines, not lips, to kiss,

To kiss another, one of those precious other

Who have too little cares and too little on

To dare try to say that they don’t want a kiss

From the one who has had too little of the

Punch, too little lacking, to dare think to kiss,

A trial run for bliss, a journey on foreign lips.

So he grabs one quickly, deftly, because

He’s swarmed and can’t tell which reached their tic

Of the toctic, but never tictoc, clocks.

She spins and stumbles, so clearly past toc.

“Hey, my name is…” But he tell, “Don’t”

Because he wants nameless faces to make

Tame-less graces in the nameless room, a

Head-of-the-bed clock going toctic

And with each locked lip, he feels the difference,

But he’s on his way, not going to

Missmiss yet another misguided kisskiss

Because the moment’s truth, so locked in you,

Is saved for few who rarely knew, and

Sweat’s bleeding unlike it used to

And all he wanted, dear God, was a kiss

For the night’s ends of emptying of a tocticked me.