Elegy

Maybe you knew what love wasn't
when I charged in, believing,
Omnia vincit amor, my Dulcinea,
wise beyond the hills, you saw through
high school Hamlet, knowing it is just
a four letter word, though you didn't say it.
What could you have known? Girl, thirteen, 
dirty-blonde halo, wind-whipped Brillo, 
tossing like a curly salad, a no rhyme/reason
uncombed treatise always incomplete. 
Did you remember long forgotten 
Immanuel Kant as you glanced
through dust-flurried shelves in the back of
Barnes and Noble when books, coffee, cafes 
became the rage again? Something about Beatniks, 
wasn't it? Kerouac, Corso beckoning like  
Ferlinghetti's city lights, pure poetry to the uninitiated,
dithering idiot dilettantes who drank the electric koolaid
acid test, and said, yum, yum, yum. I'm not saying 
I believe what Capote wrote, only I'm not twenty-one and stoned,
living in that lonely home all roads lead to.
I hope you found one, and were happy- whatever
that means. Perhaps, once, you thought,
a grocery list can be a poem, 
lemon is more than just a color,
and sometimes, some loves
never die.