Elementary
This poem is old by performance standards, but I still share it with great regularly.  It was one of the poems that NPR picked up.

Unto like a flower,
and I am kissing her petals with exuberance,
making joyful gardener noises
soiling her earth with my words.
If it helps her grow,
should she not want it all the time?
If she can bloom from my attentions,
isn’t there something natural about the whole affair?
And if it ain’t love, maybe it’s just
the photosynthesis talking,
oxygen kicking its way into our mouths,
the sun making us drunk off our own chloroplast.

And when did things become so academic?
When did it all become science fair projects:
battered wives in glass jars
men tagged with blue ribbons because
they had the right shoes on
50 points for a poster board of
all the guys you dogged out
and a written report of why you really
got divorced before 30.

I prefer my love elementary.
I like my love pre-school style:
anciently instant and embedded.
I have been dreaming about you
since I first lay my head on
nap-time blankets
swinging my foot over the edge of
the day-care cot to the rhythm of your walk
Everything is so much clearer after snack time.
If it ain’t love, then maybe it’s
the graham crackers and milk talking.
But I know that I have loved you forever.
LEAST since recess.

And they say it ain’t mature to fall in love
like you did in 5th grade:
see the girl with her friends at recess
straighten up your play clothes
step over
say hi
Yeah…nightclubs are so different.

There wasn’t anything wrong with
falling in love over the hot packs at lunchtime.
There was something pure about
giving a girl you liked your only sugar cookie.
There was something natural and right and
most like true love about falling for the girl
you played truth and dare with,
‘cause if she really didn’t want to kiss you,
she could always tell a lie.

I prefer my love like 5th grade,
full of pure emotion at first sight,
lions on a pride,
running off at recess under the jungle gym to kiss
like no one could see you

I slip you a Lincoln Log under the table and I think
you know what I want.
That’s right, baby, a pencil fight,
so let’s get to it before the teacher comes.
Let’s smack those staves until one of them breaks and
let’s play Knuckles and
make glue fingernails and
turn our eyelids inside out and
sit at the back of the bus and
jump rope and
eat paper and
play Uncle and
smell each other’s bellybutton fingers and
pass notes and
sit Indian-style on the floor and
write on our desks and
kill each other with the kickball and
be one another’s science fair project
and
feed off of the sunshine that is instant, pure love,
photosynthesize our emotions naturally
through our petals and stems until we love
like we are young again.

Copyright 2002 - Scott Woods