TocTic Kiss Kiss
Location
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.