All Bets Are Off

Dear old friend,

I’m sorry I’m breaking your heart

And this is hard for you to understand.

I threw a wild card in

and you know I won’t be forced my hand. 

You’re calling my bluff,

but I’m folding and cashing in my chips.

I was there when the chips were low,

But you played your cards close to your chest.

So don’t call on me old friend,

Upping the ante, don’t call on me.

While I laid my cards on the table

And didn’t keep a single one up my sleeve.

So don’t call on me old friend,

Don’t call on me -calling a spade, a spade.

[Follow suit] 

Gustavo

Brown- mushroom hair cut, medium-tone brown eyes like the color of grinded coffee beans before they hit the hot water and dissolve into black- that is what Gustavo looked like. Gustavo, was my first crush on a real boy. On a boy not in posters or in a boy band. On a boy that was not Nick Carter. On a boy that was not completely white.

I don’t remember much about him anymore, but I do remember that his voice was slightly an octave or two deeper than the rest of the boys. Or maybe, I just like to remember him sounding deeper.  The last time I saw him was in the fourth grade, after he yelled my name when I got off the school bus.

I have tried rummaging through old school pictures at the bottom of my mom’s drawers to find him on Facebook, but I have never had any luck. Somehow Ms. Rodriguez’s second grade class picture of 2000 is the only one my mom still doesn’t have somewhere squeezed in the back of all her pantyhose.

You know I would write your name

Across my mattress after dragging you to

Friday Night Slam at the Nuyorican

Barely three poets in I’d ask you “Do you want to come home with me?”

And you would say “I thought you said you liked live poetry?”

I would breathe onto your neck

“Yes, I like alive poetry

You, My bed, Right now”

When we would get to my apartment

I would slam you against the bed,

Reach for my dresser,

And throw you a pen and a sheet of paper.

The smirk you had all the way home would fall

“Really?”

Catching your smirk I’d say

“No.

But tell me you don’t have a million things

To write about after you kiss me”

Q.E.D.

Maybe, you’re right.

You’re too damaged to fill the variables between us

I can feel the scar tissue “she” left,

But just when I’m about to get an angle 

You’re looking for all the ways to lock me out of the grid.

Probability, you call it. 

You and me, we’re two scalene triangles.

Acutely looking for some more congruency and a little less guesswork.

But for all that tangent you’ve gone on about the now baby,

It’s been you that’s been going ahead and doing the math.

I see the way you’ve been mapping me out of your head

And finding all the complex numbers.

Trying to find proof of why it won’t work.

One more day

Just one more goddamn equation.

Fuck your trigonometry. 

Q.E.D.