Best thoughts. In the morning whose
raucous beams into my privacy as I wake
after a long night of reliving petty
wrongs of a long life there the vision
of your long curved legs tight white
torso dark whirlpool of your birth up-
lifted breasts and that smile of devil-
ment etched permanently onto your face
your long red flag of hair like ribbons
or rivulets after Spring showers run
along the pillow on the snow white silk
uncovered like a miracle of the virgin
appearing to young children you lie.

First love first thought of love best
love and best thought that I would ever
know. I rise drain my toothless dragon
of desire, shave a cave-dwelling urge
to be beard pluck a rebellion of hairs
from each ear lobe trim from my nose
its disgusting wilderness sprung up over
night then shower. With cold water of
a new day on old skin the odor of these
first thoughts scurry down the gurgling
drain like so much blood from my wrists
awakens me to the knowledge that you
are not there on our bed waiting not in
the kitchen preparing not beside our
pool with your toes wiggling in water
not in my life at all nor had you been.

All this is mine. Wealth without promise
nor heirs without you who I abandoned
for a good job fast car and 15 minutes
of fame as an evening news bright new
star that I had been that left me empty
alone with my first best thoughts never
pursued. You forever twenty-two.
   
 

John Horváth Jr., a South Chicagoan in Mississippi exile, has written since the 1960s. His poetry is most recently published in Perimeter, Duct Tape Press, and Mindfire Poetry Journal (US), and in Badosa EP (Spain), Audax (Germany), and The Inditer (Canada). His poetry explores ethnic and regional, private or public, identity. He writes about the strange and stranger among or within us, about where events, experience, history, and memory mingle. Links to John Horváth, Jr.:
 Editor, PoetryRepairShop [http://www.geocities.com/~poetryrepairs/];
 Poetry Editor, Amateur Poetry Journal [http://amateurpoetry.virtualave.net/];  Bibliography [http://members.tripod.com/~PoetryRepairShop/1990s.html].

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