There

I wrote this for an Expanded Imagist Poetry assignment for my Creative Writing class my sophomore year in college. I turned in the pencil drawing  for a Drawing Studio class in 2000.

“There” 8-30-00

On cold concrete steps
long abandoned like the building behind,
she told him her biggest fear,
which he helped cease, and made her smile.

She wondered how many had fallen in love there,
with the rough, red bricks scraping their backs.
He thought about how many in the past had sex there,
(as they did) with the sharp, rusty guard rails in the way.

He drew lines in the clay to make her think
while they discussed his dreams to travel the world
and her dreams to write stories about it.
He was her future; but she (she feared) was his past.

She sobbed and ruined her favorite shoes one night
to steal two bricks from the building’s rubble,
which cut her hands and burned the blood in her heart
glad he can take there no other.