My First Kiss

MY FIRST KISS

As the millennium turned the corner in 2001 I launched myself onto a host of websites. Three years later in 2004 I had in my files information about literally hundreds of these sites. Many of them involved posting my prose-poetry. Some of them involved me in making assessments of the poetry of others. Occasionally in teaching youth and adults in the years 1968 to 2004 I had to assess, to comment on, a student’s poem. But just as my career of teaching and assessing student work ended in late April of 2004, I new field opened on the Internet where the assessment of someone’s poem was involved. One such poem was called “My First Kiss.” The seminal idea for the poem which follows comes from reading that poem by a Tom Friel(May 6, 2004) at the site called Wild Poetry Forum.-Ron Price, Pioneering Pver Four Epochs, May 26, 2004.

It came so fast from her:
juicy, warm, unexpected,
filled me to overflowing,
in the evening I recall now
nearly fifty years ago,
just when I’d come across
an utopian ideology with
the future in its bones,1
little did I know in the midst
of what seemed to me just
simple-sweet reasonableness.

The girl and the kisses
were soon gone:
I never kissed Karen again,
but the ideology remained,
a cultural base for a globe,
a base for a web:
of consciousness,
of imagination---
in the midst of a babel
of voices in the decades
as the crisis of western society
deepened and its dark heart,
the darkest before the dawn
in this age of transition.

Kisses have been for me
much more work than I
ever imagined they’d be.
As the years went on
I kept trying to make it!
But the work was more
than anyone had ever told me.
In that ideological home, too,
it was often more than I could bear.

In ’57 the first man orbited the earth;
in ’62 the first American and I began
to pioneer that new ideology
from one end of the earth to the other.

1Daniel Bell, the End of Ideology, 1960.

Ron Price
May 26 2004