I love what you've done with the place

[champagne1982]

A chorus of laughter and clinking glasses;
shuffling feet, Jack Johnson, the air
strung with tiny lights and crisscrossed
with glances. I love
what you’ve done with the place.

This room had a couch
over there: I kissed a girl
who went by one name
and wore small doll’s hands
strung for a necklace.
“Who doesn’t dream,”
she asked, “of being touched?”

I pass two boys on guitars.
They’re not good, but sincere,
and that’s enough
to circle a choir of lipsticked
crescendos and metronomed fistpumps.

Through here was a bookcase bowed
with poetry, a place where we argued
the line break, the trope, so close
our mouths almost touched,
and I remember the first time
you put your finger
on my lips to shut me up,
and I remember

the staircase, now blocked
with bodies who scoot
to one side to let me pass,
and the way your hand felt
under mine on the banister.

Oh you know how it is when grown
the flavour of the beer bashes passed
out on the floor beside a crowded couch
that's made for 3 to sit but can't carry
a threesome through an orgy stales
in comparison to the foggy memory
of that night when a little privacy felt
more a propos than dancing
among the mindless frat boys
lined up outside the rufied-up
chick's door who couldn't move
her legs closed to save her life
and as we climbed those stairs
I could only wonder at how long
those putty boys would keep smiling...