The summer endured with a kiss:

He was the worst thing that I could have loved.

Bulldog called him the Straightened Arrow,
because *"**** like him get all the ladies"
with his curls that turned like a surfer's dream.
But in order to not be, Arrow had to bend.

Because a bent arrow never flies far.

He would pity me with his hands in mine
late in the nights spent buried in his bed.
We shared our secrets and our stories,
our ******* nightmares and our souls.

Through the sage and past the shack
he took me down the beaten trails
to where he swore no one had been before.
The sun was an actor and the train tunnel's arch our seats.

The play progressed from Act Noon 'til Act 6:00.
We sat on the overlook singeing our lungs,
flicking cigarettes onto the occasional train.
The stench of tar, then a nuisance, is memorial to this day.

And once, on the artificial cliff where no man had been
on a day when the sun, tinged terribly red
by the burning of a forest I would now never know
had played its most powerful sunset,

Arrow kissed me.

His lips
were as soft
as sheer air.

That was the day I learned to hate theatre
and the day I first loved a poison.
He was the only boy who ever kissed me because he liked me,
and not because I like boys and you like boys and we both like boys, too.

Because he didn't.

Throughout the summer I walked with him and his girls through the sage
and past the shack to that vaulting arch hung above the tracks
where I watched him kiss them fast, kiss them sweetly,
I noticed how he never kissed them the way he kissed me.

His lips never looked so soft as they did that evening, and the sun never set so right.

*And the summer went on.