Elaborate prom proposals (“promposals”, natch) are a thing. I never asked in a fancy fashion. For my junior prom 27 years ago (mortality! eeek!) the prom obligation with my then-estranged girlfriend lurked for six weeks while we were separate (with great drama) until we were reunited prom night and then rolling again as a couple for almost another year after that. So, rather than a romantic promposal, it was a month or more of stomping around, or wailing, or languidly, anguishedly lamenting/complaining/wishing “Well, I guess we’re not NOT-going-to the prom. So I think we’re still going?” Flopping about, crying, pleading for sympathy from any friends willing to listen.

To the outside world? I was a damned nuisance. Inside? Nature bade me steer my body’s ship to its siren call, pointing the prow to its rocky, turbulent, amoral shore to breed (with protection) and feel at all costs, even to exhaustion and oblivion. And, by golly, my seventeen years of life would not have been in vain to die tossed and broken onto that jagged beach. [final cough] I lived. [expires]

Ridiculous now? Substantially. Are the memories still dear, the perverse, feral, mad, beautiful things that they are? Yes.

U.S. poet Robert Pinsky read a promposal on ‘The Colbert Report’ this week. Not a great poem, but charming:

Promvitation!
by Robert Pinsky

As when, far off, in the middle of the ocean,
A breast-shaped curve of wave begins to whiten
And gathers and gathers until it reaches land
Huge as a mountain, and breaks.
And what was deep comes churning up from the bottom
In mighty swirls of sunken sand and living things
And water.
So in the springtime, every race of people
And all the creatures on earth all rush to charge
Into the fire that burns them. Love moves them all.
And that same wave, and that same fire, move me to dare ask:
“Will you be my date for the prom?”