MY YOUTH Dating that crazed, heart-breaking Italian, wanting to die as my first feelings bleed all over the sidewalk                       W.B. Yeats in my backpack,                                               true love, my religion. Youth is painful Pretending the zit on my nose wasn’t as big as a condo, and that at sixteen such things didn’t really matter. Are you looking in my eyes or at my pimple? I now understood how women with large breasts must feel. The schizophrenia of wanting to be unique and yet fit in. Wanting to be liked, but hating what you had to do for it. Youth is confusion The irreconcilable news flash from my mother that, “You’re not so special!” Cautioning me not to make too much of the standing ovation just hours earlier, she protecting me from Vanity Falls . Failing in the laboratory of French kissing. Thinking how it is an acquired taste like beer. Her mouth awash with the scent of garlic – a remnant of the Italian restaurant and the dinner I bought, hoping to warm her toward the submarine races. I drowned in the sea of experience           while I struggled to become a rooted adult.