hellopoetry.com/poem/1106978/witherspoon/
witherspoon
3/7/2015

I've met a few good men,
a few good men, this is why
I am so vexed.

The springing pantomines
of careful youth rings around
the green, as it always has

the campus store sells
cigarettes and muffins and condoms
as it always has, and

although the mood is different than
the one on early semester Halloween
night,

The grass is as green as it always
has been.
I need to learn to let people

and things go, but it doesn't help
when you live, when half of those memories

happened in towns where George Washington and Witherspoon got
drunk off their *****,

and Madison lied about men in the woods. Sitting dully alone in the stadium

the vast Powers,
I am one in 23,000
and I do not know how I feel

about that and the lost
days when I used to chain smoke
voraciously in the parking lot

in a car that smelled like
burnt tobacco
and run through

the rain in Murray dodge,
write on the walls at the Pyne
arches and smoke

drugs with friends
in the freezing rain on Wilson's
grave.

This is all gone now
and
I need new trivial distractions

now that all of mine are gone
and I see the summer sun getting
closer to my bruised memory.


i've met a few good men
key word:
few.

the quivering ghosts of our
salad days runs around the green
do you remember? are you sure?

i ran through the campus store
laughing til my liver hurt
posing with antifreeze, asking friends "anyone want shots?"

i don't know, wouldn't know
what princeton's like now
because i haven't been in six months.

i do vaguely remember
strips of it, the cheesecloth that wrapped around
the ides of april, freezing and shivering under my arms.

i still haven't learned how to let people go.
it is difficult when
you live in a town that is made by its history.

what town or person isn't?
constant talk of Stockton, Witherspoon and Washington's
crossing damns my existence.

i used to go down to the stadium
freeze my fingers off or pop open bottles with
White

i remember when i lied to Lacava about my first time
smoking cigarettes that is
he bought me my first pack

i sat in the front seat of the car that january
trying to coolly inhale
begging to god to not let me cough.

i didn't.
i remember i ran through the rain with someone i loved, once
through murray dodge

he'd told me he never forgot the way
i looked with eyeliner dripping down my face and
my soaking hair slowly curling into snail shells.

i'd written on the arches at Pyne
then i'd written on the walls with our spit
joking - why's it called PVNE?

I sat serenely with my friends one February day
that year, i must specify because one  has passed already.
smoking bouges on Burr's grave, so bougie.

i got new distractions
i don't have any way to keep them, though
i'll find a way in the summer

or maybe not
maybe.
maybe.