This is an elegy I wrote in 1991.  I had been dating a "straight" boy who, as I learned much later in our relationship, had never actually been with anyone — boy or girl.  Much to my surprise I found that I was his first sexual encounter and his first romantic relationship.  This is the same person I wrote love lives here about (yes, I was more than smitten).

Because I was out and he was not (again I stress he was "straight"), we had a difficult time over the year and so many months that we dated.  I was so madly in love with him and wanted to express it in any way that I could.  This clashed terribly with his closeted point of view and extreme fear of being labeled anything but heterosexual.

We broke up several times during our relationship because he couldn't "deal with" being in love with another man, but he always came back and proclaimed his love for me even more passionately than the last time.  Each time we separated and rejoined one another, our relationship would become even more powerful, more passionate, more encompassing than it had ever been.

Yet we never got to our second anniversary.  He decided he would join the US Army and marry a sweet hometown girl, although perhaps not in that order.  His desire to be a father to her child (who really knows who the biological father was…) and sincere anguish at what he felt in his relationship with me certainly pushed him to make the decision to leave.

We spoke a few times over the two or three years after we parted in silence and tears, but my hopes, expressed as longing in this childish little poem, were never realized.

This is a daft and almost ingenuous — dare I say juvenile? — attempt to put into words what I felt when we said our final goodbyes.

he leaves again
I weep for him
I love him so
please don't go
he cannot stay
don't go away
my love for him
does not dim
will he come back
until then lack
my empty heart
becomes dark
the space he left
is so unkempt
he cannot leave
to him I cleave
left all alone
the tears are gone
for what I weep
I cannot keep
is it meant to be
I will see
I hope it is
but fear still lives

[circa 1991]