Wallflowers

In the din of junior high, filtered lights

and muted colors blend with the music’s pulsations

into a hazed memory of standing alone against a wall,

a wallflower, a memory that doesn’t fade as flowers do

in time and decades passing by, passing slowly:

heavy feet drumming and pounding on the wooden floor

of a junior high dance he didn’t want to attend, but did,

feeding his loneliness, a loneliness he still remembers,

like a wallflower pressed flat

between the pages of then and now,

an impression left on the pages of his life.