Before I’d felt the promised kiss of either –
pink tongue of one, feathered breath of the other –
I knew their kinship among lords of life
and fealty I’d pay from pocket or heart,
or both.  Stoic Catholic teacher-priests
had ceded the subject to shocked locker
room gossip, so imagine my wonder,
child of the fat book, when I blundered on
Romeo and Juliet in the library
Carnegie’s steel monopoly gifted
my Hoosier town.  Oh how the bard’s language
spilled like sunlight through the oft-zitted dome
shrouding my green teenage brain, a verbal
hubbub above the flesh and brash sword play.

*          *          *

Our play at home featured yardstick-duels,
my sister trilling, “Avaunt, arrant knave”
until I thwacked her knuckles and she cried. 
Sent to my room, I bled Mercutio’s
last gasp into red carpet, perfecting
the raised head’s fall.  By luck, Zeffirelli’s
classic movie remake graced the downtown
Paramount’s sagging screen.  It cost a week’s
lunch money, glad fasting, so friends and I
might treat a sweet trio of girls beneath
the balcony’s stiff lip.  I’d love to say
our hand-holding, like any gateway drug,
led to higher pleasures, but mine was greased
with popcorn slurb and hers was wet with sweat. 

*          *          *

Don’t sweat the truth:  It wasn’t my heart’s first
nor last diffident failure, and this time 
I looked up when Olivia Hussey’s
olive chest splashed on screen, each breast maybe
four feet across and deeply cleaved.  Though I’d
seen others flashed in sticky magazines
flooring the burned-out basement where bad boys
sniffed glue, and though since I’ve held love’s ample
gifts, none was as monstrously glorious
as these Shakespeare conjured in serif type. 
Who was Capulet and who Montague
I don’t remember, nor the actor’s name
who played Romeo in stitched elastic
tights, that too-prissy narcissistic fool.

*          *          *

We three fools of brushed velour mourned those breasts
amidst the climax’s sad collapse.  Moping
and hushed, we walked our brick streets home, the girls
safely station-wagoned off by mommy. 
That not one of us boys had touched any
sweatered breast meant not a lick. Confusion
fueled our hormonal musings, April ‘68,
a few ticks late for the Summer of Love
we’d read about soundly after the fact. 
A crowd frothed around the YMCA,
someone with a yellow bullhorn lathered
the night faces that dipped and rose like waves
of inland seas.  When we turned on Lincoln,
the bullhorn’s feedback asked, Hey, what’s the time?

*          *          *

The time’s answer:  One fist smashed my glasses,
another my white cheek.  Each swing brought its
own brass-knuckled reply:  “Time for Dr. King,”
“Time for our Miss Rosa,” “My time, mo-fo” –
each quick punch a blunt, punctuated grunt. 
I rope-a-doped as would Ali in his
Thrilla in Manila, till each had done
with me what he would.  The yellow bullhorn
bellowed, What’s the time?  The brothers answered,
Black Power, Black Power, until I knew
what it was to have none.  In dewy grass,
beneath a sappy maple, I looked in
their eyes and they in mine.  All right, we looked
but didn’t – this, the day Martin got his. 

*          *          *
                                               
His was death, though I’d like to say I learned
a fleshed lesson –  one you carry folded
in the pocket your wallet’s in, something
to mull in traffic, awaiting the doc,
or popping corn for the rented movie
the kids can’t watch.  You’re waiting to hear it,
white America, so you can smirk your
absolution.  And yes, you’re waiting too,
black America, so you can shake your head,
I don’t get it.  When the twenty finished
with me, they chanted down Lincoln’s rubble.
One man, eyeing my near-sighted fumble
and plea, picked up my too thick black-rimmed specs
and placed them gently on my swollen face.

*          *          *

“Face it, you at the wrong place at the wrong
time, brother.”  He said, brother.  Through cracked lens,
we might’ve been – his face pieced together
as Picasso knew before the first war,
before the second, before Jeanie Creek
tended my lumps, she pregnant by a black
guy her parents wouldn’t let her marry.  
Her radio spun the web we’re trapped in,
as Zombies sang “it’s the time of the season
for loving.”  My friend Clayton, black as his name,
kicked the gang leader’s butt.  For me, he said. 
I looked in his eyes, he in mine.  America?
Sure:  Clayton’s in prison, I write sonnets.
The truth?  Look it in the eye or you’re blind.

From American Ghost Roses, University of Illinois Press, 2005.