God damn it.

James Bowden

I hate Texas. It’s always hot. The sun burns through my skin, sapping me of my energy. Funny how that works.
Water. Cold water.
I take a sip from the dented orange Nalgene and taste the rubber of the splash guard.
Still the best purchase I’ve ever made.
And it still tastes as it did 6 summers ago, when I bought it full of coke for $14 at Camp Whitsett
I think

I remember swimming that mile in the frigid mountain lake.
Watching Johnny nearly cut his fingers off and Alec Moya eat moths off of the lanterns.
Carving some totem out of wood. I don’t even know what the fuck I made.
Watching Forrest Gump for the first time.
Whistling obnoxiously with Keith as the flag climbed each morning.
Cooking cheeseburgers and shooting guns.
Tipping the mast of my sailboat over and right into the mud at the bottom of the lake. Or was that at Emerald
Bay? Or the second year at Whitsett? Was there even a second year at Whitsett?

I don’t fucking know.
I know that it happened. That I was there. At some point in time.
But I do not remember.
I cannot.
And you are absent from those memories
More like historical facts.
And yet the only bit I truly know, truly remember with every cell in my body
Is that I loved you then
And that I long for you now
Carrying patrol boxes and burning rice and rapping Lighters at midnight and pouring our souls out into each
other’s hands as shooting stars blinked across the horizon until our tyrannical eyelids finally conquered our tired minds

I don’t know what the fuck we talked about.
I never did the next morning.
Only that I wished I didn’t get tired so that we could spend every minute of those 45 hours
Together. Being.
And now I remember:
The only real hug we ever shared up on that rock as the kids smoked weed in the premature mountain blackness
The silver lining.
Sanding those pinewood blocks into shitty cars when no one else would join us
Playing cards.
Eating Doritos and Oreos knowing the consequences of tomorrow and not caring
Sleeping side by side, warmly floating in that cold dark and not because of our hammocks

You say I had no childhood.
Because I never wasted time.
Because I had never seen the shows you’d seen, because I did not play the games that you did, because you
could choose any movie from your hard drive and I’d not have watched it.
You are wrong.
You were my childhood.
God damn you. For making me feel. For teaching me love.

Perhaps my Nalgene doesn’t taste like rubber anymore. It’s been washed hundreds of times since I bought it.
But the taste on my tongue is no less real and I am sure of it regardless of whether it truly is or not. Now.
Fuck Texas. I might as well be on Venus.

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This holds for this and a good amount of the older poetry here, but also in general: I won’t really speak for the quality of the poetry, but I think some of the sentiments are nice and it’s also nice as a record of what I was thinking and feeling and writing back then, when I was younger and such.