Been old for a while now…
Back when I was kicking off my second (successful) attempt to graduate from university, I was taking a physics course… I think it was the physics course… at Mesa College. In that class was a lovely young woman who had clipper-short hair which she’d dyed in tiny patches of various shades of golds and light browns. Her ownership of her person was so clear to me, to everyone. She made me feel at ease because she was at ease. I definitely felt an attraction, but it was an attraction to her… being herself, rather than to her as a person. I wanted to be like her. She was, completely unknowingly, one of my first role models in pleasing myself rather than others, in being what I wanted to be rather than what I assumed other people needed me to be. Anyway, I don’t remember her name. I gave her a copy of this poem I wrote about her, and no doubt she thought I was a weirdo. That’s fine. In giving it to her, I was myself.
Wacky old woman at Mesa writes a villanelle
You are so young, you make me want to write
A ballad to the way you’ve dyed your hair
With little smears and stains of dappled light,
As if you went out when the sun was bright
And strained it thru a tree climbed on a dare.
You are so young, you make me want to write
Amid these numbing walls of beige and white.
For me this place is easier to bear
With little smears and stains of dappled light.
You make me feel my age and so I fight
To find each quirk or attribute we share -
You are so young! You make me want to write,
But giftless, all I do is sit, not quite
Inspired enough to do much more than stare
At little smears and stains of dappled light,
And on each dapple “wish I may, I might”
Osmose some youth from you thru this stale air…
You are so young — you make me want to write
With little smears and stains of dappled light.
Been old for a while now… was originally published in eustonmouse on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.