'Twas the Night of the Prom

Let me tell you a story,

If you’ll let me indulge,

Of a sad little boy, his tuxedo-pants bulge.

No need to be vulgar,

Yet memory be mended,

The wording will be as the story intended.

‘Twas the night of the prom,

A sock-hop, a dance,

Let’s call it a spade, twas a virgin’s last chance,

For a punch on his V-card,

A check on his page,

To come (in a whole fifteen seconds) of age.

Imagine a man-boy,

A youth of sixteen,

Dressed up for the night, he arrives with his queen.

A raven-haired maiden,

In frolicking lace,

The picture of poise and of spunky punk grace.

They arrive in a carriage,

A stretch-limousine,

The sidewalks still glisten with a midsummer sheen,

They step into the building,

And up to their table,

The whole room adorned like a ballroom of fable.

The effect is diminished,

Of course, by the teens,

Who bump and who grind like the hormonal fiends

That they are, oh how wasted,

Are the banners and lights,

That twinkle like stars on a midsummer night.

But ah, to our man-boy,

We must now return,

Who sits and who mopes with affections gone spurned.

The raven haired maiden,

He’d dated before,

What was great at the start became quickly a chore

In her eyes, she had dumped him

Left him, his heart on a pike

His first time in love and her next time in like.

But oh how he’d made

His excuses and hounded

At last she’d agreed, if the man-boy be bounded

That they were going as exes,

Just going as friends,

That there was no ulterior romantic end

To this night; he agreed,

On the surface, at least,

But oh how his love-stricken mind, it did feast

Upon fantasies born

Of rom-comedies,

Of firelight, candles, the idea that the ‘she’s’

Of the world, in the end

They would fall for the ‘me’s’,

The love-stricken boy he had caught this disease.

So he waited and schemed,

Even as night progressed,

Ways to romantically undo her dress,

Compliment, compliment,

Flattery, praise,

Nothing he said could this fair maiden faze.

The last dance, he thought,

Would be just the ticket,

To maneuver him out of this vast friend-zone thicket.

So he sprung to his feet,

And took her to the floor,

This maiden he wanted so much to adore

Him right back, and the

DJ, that joker, that clown,

Cried, “just one more dance ‘fore I skip outta town!”

And they started the slow-dance,

This man-boy and maiden,

Their bodies together, his heavily laden,

With tension, with passion,

With visions of love,

‘Neath the chandelier lighting that twinkled above.

It happened so quickly,

But remembered, so slow,

As the hormones took hold and romance it did glow

And his body touched hers,

It soon started to show,

That the lining of his pants had begun to grow.

His face flushed with horror,

And shame and with heat,

His pants shouted “forward” while his mind cried “retreat!”

And she knew, oh she knew,

There was no disguising,

Her stiffening body react to this rising.

There was no pushing forward,

And no place to flee,

So the dance it continued on so awkwardly,

When the music at last,

Had come to a stop,

They broke their embrace like a butcher’s-knife chop

Had cleaved just between,

Where their bodies had met,

There was no option left, there was only regret,

She spoke very little,

For the rest of the night,

And his eyes, so ashamed, darted ‘way from her sight.

So what more can I say,

What more can I tell,

of this brief, awful glimpse into hormonal hell?

There’s no moral to glean,

No more left to hear:

We lost any pretense by the end of that year.

It would be a year more,

Until I punched out that card,

For her I can only guess in that regard.

She went on with her life,

And still mine goes on now,

With the slight hints of wrinkles forming up on my brow.

Still sometimes I wonder

As I lay nights awake

And I self-flagellate for life’s tiny mistakes.

What might have been different,

For that man-boy, that loner,

Had he not been cursed with the world’s worst-timed boner.

And although it was painful,

All wounds heal in time,

In my case, I fight it through humor and rhyme,

And through poems and verse,

Funny quips that I share,

That I expound to people who hardly could care,

For in the sharp light of day,

We cannot help but smile,

When we gather round close for the briefest of whiles,

And laugh way the horrors,

That haunt the long night,

As a manner of healing, as a great way to fight,

Such memories as this,

And we learn and we grow,

When we bear all our faux-pas and let the past go.

So next time you’re resentful

Perhaps you should indulge

Share your own little tale, your tuxedo-pants bulge.

Note: My fiancee (who is, unsurprisingly, not the woman in the poem) insists that I

mention that I am no less gooberous (her word, not mine) now then I was all those years ago.

Also, happily ever after. I guess.

...

She's still laughing at me.