an evolving collection of soul-searching poems from two lovers who experiment with points of view.
My other collection is called Zoid. There are also quite a lot of my poems not online. Held in reserve I suppose, should I ever attempt getting published in print.
Kiss me my love, lips to lips.
Let my hair molest you too,
As I lean over and allow the brittle tips to pounce upon your face.
How long has it been?
How much did we forget?
You've not seen what's become of me.
You don't know what is gone.
Learn me anew, my dear,
Bury me in your skin.
Let my fingers sliding down trace
The sinews of your body,
Every tempting curve and irregular terrain
That Time, not Nature, has given you.
Coarsely, we shall love,
For our hearts require connection,
Our flesh will be fulfilled.
I want to make love to you in daylight,
In a bed,
In a room with a door that locks,
In a room that belongs to us and our future.
I want your kisses, your face, your heart,
A truth that we may share.
It comes with time, words, and breaths
Softening the dark, hastening the moon.
I want to make love to you in daylight
And let the sun try to be warmer than your kiss.
I want to watch you smile and blush
In a dawn that lingers for us,
Traces the outline of our embrace.
I want to tumble and laugh and sing.
To dance and tangle in one heartbeart.
To know that you remember all and feel everything.
I want to touch every part of you
And drown in your skin.
You under her fingertips.
She ought to write poems forever about you under her fingertips.
The morning is too still.
She is hungry-restless.
So he'll catch her,
Huddling over words, in this morning,
Straining for the square of light to fall upon the pages,
Half-blind.
Bedside author indeed.
So he'll catch her in this morning,
Leaning at her back
And reading over her shoulder.
The strange construction of her whispers.
Where did she learn it?
Why answer?
Why give it up?
It is what comes to her,
What's 'come natural.
Leaning at her back
And reading over her shoulder.
My lover's eyes are better than the sun
For waking me in the new-brushed dawn
And filling with light the corners of my soul
That have been too long encrypt in night.
My lover's kiss is everything like the sea,
Beating down the stones of my heart into sands
And washing out the traces of other tides that have torn at my shore.
My lover's smile is all I've seen and all I need of heaven.
Down the pockets of her soul
He could reach and cause a stir,
Letting in a breath and air of new warmth.
With a place of stillness between them,
He could hold her
With no more than his stare.
Perhaps that was why she loved him.
The place he most liked to touch
Was down the pockets of her soul.
Her lover is angel fire,
Electric song,
Moon ocean,
And amber heart.
Let her always blink
And wake beside him.
There can be no guilt
In wanting to hide inside him.
She's never found anyone so gentle.
There is no dream she doesn't want him in,
No passion she doesn't want him to ask.
There must be some reason why I got fully dressed today.
Must be.
You'll ask her, of course,
If she has any sense in her,
Any morals whatsoever.
Petty little criminal she is,
Stealing this little moment with you.
Useless sins.
What are the keys to your soul?
What can she do, beautiful enough
To make you dizzy every morning,
Lost in her like a snow storm?
Like the salt in a tear.
These lips and fingers of hers, hardly solid.
Selfish vampire she is.
Poetess.
The same.
Her child-heart dances when I am near her.
It is almost uncontrollable when I watch her eyes.
She tells me if only I will laugh and smile
With her however clumsy touch,
She will feel less need to sigh sadly,
Will enjoy the warmth of our loving,
The tickle trickling of our kisses.
She needs me more than she has words of sense to speak.
Funny little miracles are her songs.
Strange things.
Fragments coming apart,
Growing drier each season.
Strange things to worship you with.
They do all the kissing and speaking
That is more important than her hands' doings.
Abrasive, unhealing,
Only somewhat softened by her smile.
Saltier, always licked unthinkingly,
Or pressed together unmoved for hours.
She would not be surprised to learn that they are of more dead cells than even her hair.
They grow more impossible every night.
Ripping them leads more to bleeding now.
--But your wounds, too, have worsened.
Listless, liquid, languid child,
Brimming with her heartache
And stewing with indecision,
For lack of any better self she could give.
He knows full well the power of a kiss,
The meaning in a glance.
And what carries a breath, an air,
Passing along the fabric of skin
To warm the curve of an ear.
Her hands beg her for mercy.
Why does she insist on going bare in the biting cold?
Why in winter does she leave them to shiver all their blood purple?
Why so cruel to those things she needs to please him?
If he kissed them, one by one, finger by finger,
Would it mend them?
Would it mend her?
Her hair is her only vanity.
And yet she would destroy it,
Just once, if it would give her what she wants.
Her lover is compact and close.
When he lies next to her she reaches through the dark
And lays her head against him,
Her arms clinging from his neck with a drowsy touch.
She blinks and nestles near, sighing with his heart,
And he hums her still and peaceful.
He is her bliss, her light.
She can be this happy,
Her hair kissing his skin.
She can be,
Just here.
He doesn't need declaration,
No gorgeous display.
He needs no reason,
Just to touch her.
This stays.
This lasts.
It is the true thing they were made for.
It is instinct in their souls.
He has heard opposing arguments before.
His verdict is still the same.
He can be,
Just here.
His lover is a fool,
But it is all right.
She holds him just as warm,
And he sees the faith in her eyes.
She will never forget the vision.
She refuses to lose the truth again to thieves.
He carries her life in him
And she is senseless without.
She will not be told that they live in poverty.
It is enough,
This kiss of believing fingertips.
She is a lark half drowned in sorrow.
She whispers these songs
Because she has been humming them all her life,
She has been dreaming them without knowing why.
Her voice is faint and will not carry out.
But she longs to be heard.
She longs for it now.
I have seen her go trying for a public note,
Risking her voice in the empty spaces of air,
To accustom herself to hearing her breath resound.
She is singing Streisand now,
Her favorite in loneliness,
As if I weren't lying here with her at all.
She chooses tragedy, it seems.
Her voice breaks on happiness.
She wants to sing me Freddie Eynsford-Hill
Because she said it made her think of me when I was far.
But she cannot.
She quavers and cannot reach the note, hold the air, catch the rhythm.
It seems she can't get that voice out of her head.
She complains it was too ethereal, too far from human
And too polished for so simple a melody.
I know it's only an excuse,
But she has tried at least.
Whatever she does, the music will not make.
She keeps trying and is sorry for it.
She would like once to be better,
Once to give me a gift,
Forgetting that giving is superfluous,
That we are not founded on ceremony.
Her devotion to me will be proved by deeper things.
My voice breaks on the happy tunes.
I cannot keep my cheer for long,
Nor be a well of joy for him.
Nor do everything to meet the question in his eyes.
My lover's eyes.
Too much, too little, in my lover's eyes.
He seeks the sun in my words.
Miles of space,
An atom of privacy.
And for all I do I cannot do magic for him,
Cannot be simple.
And what can he expect of me?
And why can't I be his desires?
He has never told me no
And I wonder if he even can.
Here she begins something that might end wrong,
But it's what she starts.
So long does time go on,
So long does moonlight run.
We have these private spaces borrowed against tomorrow.
Do you wonder why she loves you this way,
Writing more than touching?
A few kisses, half asleep.
She might say she is learning to be gentle.
And yet,
And yet, haven't she been waiting?
Why did she ask for this time, only to spend most of it away?
Have you been waiting all day to show her she is beautiful,
Only to find her shy, faint, and slow,
As though she hadn't lived already ten million years with you?
What is this?
Her stirring again at dawn?
Reaching out of arms,
Leaning over to paper and pen
As if she were stealing away to another lover?
Quiet adultery even while I'm here.
Somber child.
Silly woman.
Too fixed-focus on somewhere else,
Some thoughts else.
Thinking she is writing of me,
With my voice.
Your lover's eyes hold nothing less than the fear
Of being empty.
Of you finding the chinks in her shell
And tapping them open,
Filtering yourself through,
Only to find that what you judged could be your mirror
--Could in circles be the lense that gathers you
and holds your essence in a nest of glory
--Is but a shadow, an opaque abyss leading nowhere,
Is but a hollow echo of the words you thought she knew the meaning of.
Did you want her because you thought she was sky enough to match your ocean?
She is nothing but all that crawls.
Her fingers are the measure of her health.
The thickness, the flesh that would show whether the body whole has enough.
How firm they might be,
The color,
The feel of gentle stinging or no.
They are windows to her soul,
Oracles to learn to read.
It seems I'm always either struggling not to fall asleep
Or I'm thinking myself bruised from trying to sleep.
I have sabotaged my every system,
And the only dreams that remain are those of you.
No,
I cannot swear I haven't written
Of partners my words have held beyond reason,
But they have been incarnates of us, likenesses
Of something I cannot say.
In these eyes can you read all?
And does your magic take you to the images,
The shadows as I composed them?
Would you know, if I was begging,
That I really know better?
That I understood we are not so frantic?
That our love is not to be on such vain proofs?
What has the stimulus to the nerves, the synapses,
Got to do with love?
With how I need you
In places I have not named.
Places no one has discovered.
Why do I write this?
Things that we know?
I am too emptying.
I wonder sometimes if you get tired of hearing me.
She has tendencies, I think.
What boots it for her to argue them out
And reason all to people who aren't listening to her,
Let alone to other, more quiet heartbeats?
What can they know of her gentle, cruel heart?
Cuts and scrapes,
Morning wet,
Stinging.
Don't know where they've come from,
But here they are, in taunting mystery.
Your little angel is not aware enough of her body to see.
As if the formation is invisible
Until she finally bothers to look at a place she hasn't touched for so long.
Funny to find the blood not quite settled
In this cut upon her hand,
Looking recent but recalling no memory of pain.
Funny, this bruise already stale blue on her skin,
Only feeling sore now that she ponders it, explores her leg with her fingers.
Funny how things come all at once.
It is like a knife,
Dragged thin but ragged down her foot.
Dots of red, fresh blood arise when she scratches up the scar,
Asking herself how this happened,
When her lover hasn't bitten her in ages.
He made love to her once with wildness, with ferocity,
To tell her his anger,
That she could think their contract was neither for body nor soul,
That she could excuse herself her adultery, being unclaimed.
He wanted to show her that he could move her, flood her, make her drunken of him.
When he stopped
There were no wounds.
She wants to know if I love her more for her words,
Or for her touch.
She doesn't know which will last longer.
Not in a hundred years could a trace of us be found on these pages.
They will think that we are here,
But know nothing of what we will not put on paper.
There are so many worlds that won't fit here.
You cannot count the seconds of a kiss on paper,
Measure the warmth of my breath,
Feel how tightly I press you closer.
Blood cannot flow in the ink of a pen.
Our dreams and drowning sleepiness will not gather hazy darkness to them.
They cannot, like a mirror, trace our true reflections.
Your second skin,
These clothes.
But do you remember what is beneath?
She will learn the marks, the bruises,
Of you.
She'll come near to breathe in your skin,
Your scars of her carelessness,
Her clumsy remorse.
She is falling out of me.
Falling, and finding no end.
She wants me to wrap her warm.
She is tired.
She is sorry for the vicious part of her,
Thinking she must be a little mad,
A little sick, for it.
She wants to know how to be his lover,
How to melt the ice around her heart.
He said he loved her,
But can she do any good?
And will he ever stop being kind?
She is a natural demon,
A natural destroyer.
She wishes the damn world would tell her when it will crush her.
She would like to be ready.
Which witch do you think she is?
The good witch of the north,
Or the wicked witch of the east?
I am red-light disaster,
I am varied shades of hell when caught up in twister like this.
I am aware of the sunlight departing us,
The good magic gone.
The senselessness of everything.
She feels most beautiful, most good to you,
When she is making these pretty things for you,
These little gems
That she doesn't think anyone else will read the same as she,
For you.
If you want more than she can give,
Or less,
Will you tell her?
Will you understand, here,
What she is seeking in you?
More or less.
That is what her love is like,
More or less.
Coming and going in bursts without reason.
Is not love a pledge
Of whom you would spend all your days with?
But she spends just the nights.
She stumbles in at dawn
To collapse until the bells call her away again.
She lies empty, gone of all strength.
How little I have changed her.
How little our love has done.
The only thing that molests me anymore is her hair.
Don't know why you love this little disaster in your bed.
Don't even know why she's in your bed at all.
This strange creature has somehow found her way here,
Her fingers on your skin, her voice in your ear.
She thinks you are more ancient than her breath, her heart,
The world.
For you know her too well and too deeply.
You know her inside out, head to toe.
And wiser still, you know how to mend her,
And more foolish still, you love her enough to try.
More scales than skin,
You will not find her soft.
If you try, you cannot pull the darkness from her,
The aging, the tears.
She is not the one who can delight you.
She is an agent of sorrow.
She is bone.
She is a wraith.
Tell her more haunting words.
Teach her more of what makes blood red.
She kissed me because I love her.
I love her because she kissed me.
Which of us is more sick?
You are still the one with whom I would all things do.
It is my way of faithfulness,
Selflessness.
Our nearness.
Is it necessity to you?
We are lovers and yet I know not what it means.
It is sometimes profound,
But mostly just profane.
I am sometimes tender,
Mostly just savage.
Tell me why you want such a wicked thing retreating in you.
She will not remember now the first night.
She was too young, then,
Drowning in her dazéd dreams,
Delirious.
She stumbled into me many times.
And I could press the small of her back,
Touch her soft bruised knee if I stopped to pick her up.
And I pressed her to the soft places of me,
At the juncture of the neck.
How limp and still she was as I held her.
She didn't even care, didn't even see.
Night-blindness.
Blank-slate etiquette.
Her eyelashes were heavy every morning,
And the blue under her eyes made her a drunkard hungover.
If she exploded just a little, began any violence of tongue,
They would frown and make her low, she knew,
So she stayed silent, hard, and cold.
And I figured out what was the iciness of her skin.
And she wrote great rapes, bloody wars, hedonist sadism, writhing sacrifices,
devouring orgies, and wicked witchcraft in her mind.
I could see the thoughts churning in her twitching face if I found her
any long time alone.
She was breaking, cracking every minute,
Yearning to scream out her twisted self.
And she made up for her sin by writing nonsense.
See her tale of a magic mushroom,
Of a ballerina bunny,
Of a superpower spy.
She was constructing a cage of paper for her emotions.
Fictions
To steal her
Away.
If I stared too long, I wondered if she would notice.
It was her eyes that confessed her most,
And those sometimes with her clenching hands wrought out her fury,
Pled her impatience with everyone for not seeing the obvious,
For assuming she was a child.
But she could cry.
Oh she could cry very much like a child.
I was her tissue for a while, to blow her nose,
Her security blanket she would suddenly clutch and just as swiftly
throw away if anyone else came near.
The tears.
The rivers we made.
If I spoke,
What could I say?
She was bleeding her paper cage crimson.
She was bleeding me.
How. . .
Sleepless.
Once, once she smiled.
She let me talk to her with my eyes, with my staring.
She blushed,
She blushed a whole rose garden.
She kissed me
--Then frowned.
Even now she will insist that she didn't,
That it was true, that we were true.
But she frowned.
It was not what she'd expected.
It did not rip her soul out, create magic and fire.
what a waste of a first kiss.
She was confused, would say nothing.
Afterward she would hold me only haphazardly,
Would not blush again.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
The night was too slow, too still to keep.
If there was ice, if there was raging. . .
I had not strength enough to blush.
We were not what she understood,
What she dreamed in her mind.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
If I lost her too soon,
Too long,
Why should history record it?
Why should she weep this way?
She wonders what use she is,
What strange monster her hands have made her.
She wants shades of bliss,
Slices of forgetfulness,
So she can hold on in echoing.
Fate forbid me if I drowned out her voice with mine.
She can give me one pledge.
I unraveled her.
Why did I need her?
She won't remember.
The bed says nothing.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
She writes now often of us
As I lean near.
She is comfortable,
Used to me,
Having heard me.
And over words she learns me.
We read and hold each other
Letter by letter,
Over pencil dust and unpulped paper.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
She learns quietly and decides.
She chooses me.
Did she use you then?
She wants to know.
She's asking if you will tell her,
If you will spare her
Nothing?
Perhaps wisdom dictates that the words be not spoken,
That the matter be buried quietly away
Since surely there is nothing gained now in doubting what has come to be.
But
Did she use you then?
She wants to know.
Was it unfair?
Was it untrue?
Won't you go ahead and say, if it is so,
And not pretend for her sake to not care?
Did she use you? she fears.
She knows her love has been hard enough,
That cruelty is not a thing untried between you.
She's asking.
She's doubting.
She's remembering the still, still nights
And the whispers and the private walls of heartache.
She thought only her heart was breaking then,
But
...Now
She is not so sure.
Did she use you then?
She wants to know.
Who is she to be dissatisfied with any part of me?
To not take my love as it is?
Little torture-monger she is,
Taking us round in circles unending.
All because of her
Necessity.
She wakes with him at her side
In the misery of an after-morning.
He lies still in the half light
Hanging over the direction of a paper
That lies waiting for both of them.
It seems all they can do.
All they share yet
In this bed.
And seeing it,
She reaches to him with fear to find him cold.
But it is only his same non-staring stare
When he has nothing to say to her.
When no more can be given
And no more can be mended.
She can only touch him.
Only cling at his skin
With her heart racing and breath catching at his back
While she reads
And searches for some way to answer,
To get through
His too-sharp, too-true words.
He is waiting.
Don't be sad.
Yet don't forgive
Nor forget.
We are strange things.
Can't afford to part with any of our history.
Can't afford letting go of you.
Stay.
Let go the darkness of the pain.
Come.
Don't let us feign.
Don't let nightmares weave us toward lies.
Don't forgive.
Don't let go.
You are
To her.
If she is not too careful,
She might confess everything of you,
Might spill all truths of your hearts.
And what is magic when it is caged,
When all tender belief
Is dulled to earthly vision?
If she is not too careful, you might consume her whole
And leave but ashes on these pages,
On this bed.
When we are older and unashamed,
I shall take you with me on picnics,
And we will lie in the sun on a blanket
And contemplate the ducks on the lake and the clouds in the sky.
When we are older and unashamed,
I will lay head on shoulder on you,
With sleepy eyes and lush smile,
In front of everyone who'd care to see, or not see.
And we'll stay out to see the stars, not hovering inside at a window like now.
We'll sing out even our cracking voices,
And hum these hymns of our mystery.
When we are older and unashamed,
Perhaps
You'll still wonder
Why it took until we were older and unashamed.
Her body is so amusing.
An empty gorge open to the sky.
And the rivers that carve her
--You and her tears.
Funny waddling shape she is.
Sleepy-headed fool.
Wonder why you bother with how she fits you.
Ridiculous, petty tragedy.
My hair, my clothes, my skin,
Immersed in this smell.
This reeking odor of a pointless gathering that would have bored you,
Made you wonder what I saw in this silly attempt at making contacts,
At research into what a normal life is like,
Consecrated to alcohol, gossip, and cigarettes.
This scent carried home with me, clinging to me,
Clinging to you.
Die the death of a noble knight,
Loving me,
Setting my life a-right.
I'll die the death of your sleek, best tragedy.
Your villain, your dragon, your lady-in-white-to-be.
Feline self being more than familiar,
Taking your Merlin mantle to herself, to set you free,
To take the blame, give you immortality.
Give me up to flame and fire.
I'm only a customary woman, on her lover's funeral pyre.
With this kiss we are sealed,
Our whispered vow to linger nowhere.
In headstone or ashes,
No public contract revealed.
It's called deprivation, honey.
You should try it some time.
It mends the flesh,
Purifies the mind,
And slaughters the heart.
You're the only one who ever had the right to me.
Maybe I'm just sad because you don't seem to want that right.
Foolish she was,
Thinking she could make a flower
Out of bones.
That she could be a blushing, silken thing.
A secret, hiding blossom
Waiting for your laughing coaxing of her ruffles,
Your kisses and falling into her petals.
But there is no enchantment in these veins,
And she hasn't plush enough in all her cells
To make you want the cushion of her welcome bed.
I don't expect you to touch me every day,
Or even every twenty years.
It's just that,
I'm cold when you don't touch me.
And I don't know if I have the right
To touch you every day,
Or even every twenty years.
Buttons!
So many buttons.
Harder to get out of
And into
Ecstasy.
How I love you.
Forgive me, but I love you.
Did you lose your desire for me
Out of my wrecking of our first, faint steps of devotion?
Did you let go when you could bear me no longer?
Disappointed with the reckless happenstance of my touch,
Not half so precious and sublime as you imagined my imagination could find.
Did the indifferent material of the body
Make you feel the pointlessness of incarnation and flesh?
Then why are we here, my love?
Why bother to take me home to you once more,
To speak your love after the years had worn down my will,
Made me helpless,
And resigned to mourning what could not be.
To speak after the years had brought me to know
That though I could not deny I loved you,
I could still choose to go.
I could choose to leave us in peace,
Loving no other, and knowing it would not matter.
Why speak?
Why not let me go in silence,
Knowing I loved, you loved, and leaving it at that?
What more precious thing, what higher sublime,
Then that you and I part always
In love
Undiminished by the flesh?
Surely it would have pleased you better that way.
I told you my heart, my pledge, you would have even if I left.
So why speak?
Are you fighting for this part of me?
Will you banish it?
Will I be yours utterly even if it kills me?
Tell me why you'd stop me at the door.
Tell me why you spoke.
Tell me nothing. Just kiss me.
The river-riddle flows on,
To eternity.
We serpents two. . .
Shadows of flesh.
Aren't you a little afraid of your body too?
Why should the touch of fabric unravel her so?
Why should she get caught up in the smell,
The press of it?
The visions it produces?
Is it because you've done it all to her before,
Pulled out her own threads already?
Left her all unraveled?
Womanly curves.
5 o'clock cravings for ice cream.
How she deceives herself,
Weaves a little dream that cannot be.
Wants to be a lily in my arms.
A vessel of my words.