Written Triptych

  In another mode of thought
  Slowly forgetting her native tongue
  She runs around with a whole new crowd
  experiences life she's never lived,
  having it all together.
  Trying and coping, laughing, still though
  remembering in that retentive brain
  working several notions and muffling emotions
  regarding the boy with no feelings.
  She tries to forget him
  He lives in her subconscious and across the sea:
  Out of sight.
  Sometimes receiving mail, mostly sending
  Referred to in anecdotes back home
  She cannot be first in his thoughts
  So she strives that he shan't be first in hers.
  It's hard, though,
  to quell it sometimes, when being reminded
  by the way someone tells a story
  or the way they tilt their head in listening
  Even seeing tv or movie actors to whom she has
  Drawn resemblances
  or things which she knows he would laugh at.
  Slowly she is forgetting why she liked him,
  but slowly he is being idealized, in effigy.
  In abstraction, in cool recollection,
  in absentia, infinitum.

   She has always been little and cute
   The best way to get attention is to need, and to allow others
   to know that you need.
   She has figured out her methods so long ago
   that now they're second nature to her.
   Stand before--sit before--look into his eyes...
   laugh at all his jokes, pretend no one else exists,
   become his sole audience and the only one who consistently claps.
   Then there's the protocol of relationships:
   a time arrives in which the past must be discussed.
   She discusses it a lot, in passing, to keep the topic fresh.
   The method, she finds, works on boys who have
   incompletess like an electron shell
   (remember from science class?)
   To use a strange metaphor, she is an atom of carbon;
   She'll eventually latch onto someone.
   But she must first, this discriminating one, choose a target.
   Does she do it cold-bloodedly?  True, from outward appearances
   she is not concerned with how he feels
   ("everyone can be gotten to," she once said)
   or how any other she feels,
   but she exists on planes of caring and understanding,
   all thought to be individual of each other.
   She annihialates and rebuilds, annoys and reconciles,
   apparently without knowledge,
   more likely without conscious effort.
   What makes her a loner is her unrealization of how
   like a machine of emotions she has become.
   Imput, play by logic, gain result.  Once the cycle has been broken,
   repeat.  Manipulation is her unknown sin.
   Her mechanism is organic and changable, though,
   and this is what makes her human, pitiable, pitying--and justified.

  She is a minor celestial beauty without overmuch self-confidence
  always reevaluating herself, always putting the world in order
  She is constrained and yet free in emotion.
  One could think of her as calculating, but that betrays misunderstanding.
  She is careful--and cognizant.
  Consciousness is apparently a difficult object to handle.
  She can be intrusive but unexplored,
  open and shut--a complex frustration of human.
  Unlock her mind and find a tangle of reasons and counter-logic;
  unlock her heart, but watch your step:
  possibilities unfold, kept in check by her self-image,
  damaged by her rationale, fed by emotions,
  created and destroyed by impulse.
  Singing in her solitude, laughing too loudly at someone's jokes,
  brooding over her banana yogurt,
  unsure of the world around her,
  she seeks trusting people but never trusts herself.
  This lady is deceptive and gets away with it,
  because it would be rude to tell her you know her secrets--
  and incorrect as well.
  Her Gordian nature is true and known,
  but it isn't any less confusing, stressing, or excusable for that.
  I feel encouraged and understood,
  disregarded and empty, in knowing her,
  in knowing someone who I think knows me too well
  but who luckily doesn't seem to peer as closely
  into why I can anticipate her
  as I do, studying her vested interactions,
  no longer from common cause, but now to understand myself
  and to see what I can learn from her life--
  so similar, and yet so different from mine.