First Kiss


Holding a memory in my mouth

Feeling the shape and all the grooves of it with my tongue

Like a projection it is playing on the inside of my mind

Behind my eyes I watch like a daydream

The untamed abandon of a child’s dance displayed

Lights flashed and music pulled like waves

In a dark corner, in haste, you kissed me with a kind of mechanical fervor

Meant not to linger but to move steadily on to the next touch.

After you dispensed my first kiss

A fire poured from me

And in defiance of your loudly proclaimed indifference

Your eyes flashed for a moment red and gold.

How old we felt even then, the two of us babies

You had the most empty house I had ever seen

And even after you threw stones at me and tried to suffocate my Combustion

I couldn’t bring myself to hate you for

That empty house and the barren loneliness I felt the day I visited you there.

My home was packed and moving onto unknown places

Left behind would be the wide adobe doorway with all the little tallies of Growth

Like a church it was a place of ritual.

For years tiny bodies standing up straight, heels pushed hard against the Wood

Chins shining upward, hoping to cast the full height of each measuring

In our hearts sometimes we are taller than the pencil marks reflect.

With a kind of childish wisdom I thought not much at all

of leaving the monument behind.

The tides of change had come in and already we were sailing away

Companions who would become strangers sooner than we knew

Reveling in the mystery

Excitement delivered. Lighting bolts of fear

Striking each of us, an environment of desperate joy and terror.

I remember you, a babe scouting the world

Running away at night from an arid house of spirits.

And remember how you set a blaze and then tried to put it out

A pyre that has burned for years, still burns and lights our faces

Lights the images playing on a reel

Tastes of the memory I hold in my mouth.

Poetry Under Cover

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Alexandra Ponca Stock

Written by

Looking at color and writing things down “…on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

Poetry Under Cover

continuing the work of Poetry After Dark - a home for your deepest loves and hottest passions - come join us

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