untitled (Anyway)

It's a long night,
and I've lost a lot of sleep.
And it's the wrong time
to think so deep.
But the water lies around my toes,
and I'm falling in.
She touches me,
and I'm dry again.

I should not be awake so late
I'd hate to miss the light of day
But there are things I have to say
to her, anyway.

My youth is in her eyes.
My blanket is her soul.
My love is in her heart
when my lover is alone
And I had to write it down
So she would know.

PUBLICATION: The Leader, Nov. 8, 1999, SUNY College at Fredonia.

HISTORY: Early into my second semester at Fredonia's SUNY college, my friend Cindy and I became boyfriend and girlfriend.
After staying together through the rest of that semester, we promised to write each other during the long summer break. During this break, Cindy stayed with her parents in Fredonia, and I stayed with mine in Corning, leaving a three-hour driving distance between us.
Though I did get to visit her throughout the summer (during which she would spend weekends with me in Corning), we missed each other. Between May and July, I wrote four letters to her.
The first of these letters (written in the early post-midnight hours of the night) contained this poem. An except from the letter reads...:

I tried to write poetry when I got back, but it's been so long, and despite the fact that you inspire me, I have such a hard time finding the right words to make my feeling poetic.

After typing that down, I began to type a series of lines that somehow became poetic to me. I later separated the lines and made them into poem form, after which I wrote this:

Whoa. That just popped into my head. I was just typing about how I shouldn't be up this late, and then it snowballed from there and became a poem. Weird. As you can see, I mentioned you as "her" instead of "you", which you've probably figured out already. I just think it sounded nicer that way. Maybe I'll call it "Anyway", but who knows where I'll go with the whole thing.

As it turns out, Cindy liked it so much that a few months later, she submitted "the whole thing" to Fredonia's campus newspaper. It was printed (along with an older poem I had sent her) in a special edition of the paper.
(Due to unforseen and trivial circumstances, this poem was printed without a title or an author's credit. Had I submitted the poem to the paper myself, I would not only have included my name, but also a title. And since I've never been one to leave a poem untitled, I call this one "Anyway".)
Seeing these poems--this one and "A Soul"--printed in the Fredonia newspaper gave me a very good feeling because: A) It was the first time in over a year that any poetry of mine had appeared in public print, and B) both of the poems were ones that I had sent, via snail-mail, to Cindy, thereby giving them a special place in my heart.