A Commitment Phobic's First Serious Relationship

I wrote this poem when I was 16 years old. The boy who inspired it is now a man in North Carolina, earning his degree in dentistry. I've performed it maybe 100 times, and on 11/28/07, the words (which I'd committed to memory) finally lost their meaning to me, so I lost them completely, onstage, at Nuyorican. It cost me the lowest score I've ever gotten at a slam.

In retrospect, I realize that this incident was a blessing in disguise. I now write incessantly, and feel more challenged than ever before.

I know you care for me
But, honey, you've gotta bear with me.
See, I know all you've been hearin' 'bout lately
Is stuff about my problems with intimacy
And I know that guys don't typically
Like conversations that start with "We've gotta talk."
But, uh, seriously: We've gotta talk.

You and I both know that, like rivers, we could flow
Massively, unabondonedly, entirely
Down this river of as-ifs and maybes and opportunities
That could lead to something resembling being married
Instead of dating casually.

Yeah, I know that it's only been a couple of weeks
But we talk like we think from the same brain
And it being all the same, writing being a main part of both our games,
I dig the way you read Fitzgerald and think Lifetime TV.
Before I met you, I thought I was the only one who knew
The connection between the Golden Girls and the Great Gatsby.
But seriously: We've gotta talk.

You speak of truth and time and plans
As if they were of the same knife,
Cutting through the layers of confusion
That we pile onto our plates and platters
As if nothing at all matters
But me and you and
Don't you know?
We're setting ourselves up for a fall!
A HUGE fall!
Me, with my commitment issues, and strange sentimentanlity
And mind that borders on the definition of insanity,
And you, eager to go through the motions,
Willing to drink love potions, willing to smooth lotion
On you until everything either becomes perfect or falls through and

Why can't you make up your motherfucking mind?!
Tell me what I'm getting myself into before I up and leave my world behind.
Explain to me the process by which you determine frankness and earnestness and
Please please please have the mind to let me know who the fuck Frank and Earnest are if you insist on spending so much motherfucking time with them!

Don't you know that I am going through the process of falling for you?
That if I allow myself to see myself, in those white, beaded, open-toe shoes, walking down an aisle a million miles away from everything and everything I know,
It could very well happen?
Don't you know that we're approaching the dreaded part in the relationship when everything could very well get "serious"?
Yes! "Serious!" With the dreaded quotation marks!
The kind of serious that denotes long-term but could exist between two passengers of the A train line.
I'm talking about a non-defined, altogether different kind of mentality,
In which our minds coexist and jazz music plays
As people become the way they ought to be
On stage or on TV when the curtain falls or the season ends and
The melodramatic contempo-pop singer belts out a tune I cry to.

I'm talking about the earth-shattering, silently-still, above all EVIL manner in which
We could mend each other.
Come together like twin grains of wood,
Become something so right, so good,
It could only be evil because
What is evil but the total dependence on another?
The complete, undiluted, undivided trust instilled in
Someone other than yourself
With the faith that he or she alone can make or break or shake you to your core?
I'm talking about influence at its most extreme:
I mean, when you whisper, when you scream, whether it be for pain
Or because you're happy,
I'm gonna take the sweetest, innermost heart of me
And spoonfeed it to you because of something bigger than physical attraction or gratitude.
I'm gonna do it because, in this world of lies, you alone are a fact that is true.
Nothing and no one could have prepared me for what I found in you.

And as words of truth and light, words that are wrong and right,
Ooze forth from my lips, and I tell you that I live for your kiss,
And you say you want to be the reason that I exist,
My entire world lifts and elevates, and I resign myself to a different fate
Cuz most guys would think I'm crazy
But you're just the opposite.
It makes me think "Shit. This might really be it."