I've walked your floor

sat beside you in candlelight
looking at photos
scattered across the floor.

you remembering names
and people and prayers
I had long forgotten.

you are the dancer
who glides this loner
through sorrows and the stars,
across the mist of moments
most treasured

where in the stillness between kisses
promises are kept
and the warmth of your hand on my cheek
felt in places to real to touch.

your love asks for nothing
and when you smile your quiet gift to me

tender one, every breath I take is loving you.

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Dispatches for the Colonial Office

                                           Lenin in Petrograd


               They're at it again! I wish they'd decide once and for all
                which gang of hooligans constitutes the government of
                this country!

                          -Uncle Alex reacting to fighting in the streets
                                         in Doctor Zhivago (1965)


More men in masks, and wearing scruffy clothes
Roaming the streets and waving rifles about
And which side they are on, nobody knows
Our capital is now all fear and doubt

Some demand my papers, and others my life
Some challenge my accent and exam my skin
Some threaten with a gun and others a knife
And some an unmarked car to throw me in

“Here, sir, the people govern,” Alexander Hamilton said -
No longer, alas; the people’s laws are dead

I wanted you to love me on purpose—

not by accident, not as consolation,

not because I happened to be there

when loneliness knocked at your door.
I wanted to be your deliberate choice,

the name you wrote down when asked

who matters, who stays, who gets

the careful tending of your heart.
Not the love that stumbles into being,

born of convenience or proximity,

but the love that looks and decides:

Yes. You. With intention.
I wanted to be more than circumstance,

more than the right person

at the right time in the right place—

I wanted to be the person.
The one you'd choose again

in every lifetime, every version

of this story where we meet

and you love me on purpose.
But perhaps I've learned that love

doesn't always announce itself

with grand declarations—

sometimes it just quietly decides to stay.

The sun rises anyway,

indifferent to absence,

painting the same golden squares

across your empty bed.
Coffee brews in kitchens

where your name will be spoken

in past tense for the first time,

voices breaking on the syllables.
Your phone buzzes with messages

that will never find you—

lunch plans, inside jokes,

the ordinary love of ordinary days.
Someone will have to call your work,

cancel your dentist appointment,

decide what to do with the milk

that expires next Tuesday.
The world keeps its appointments

while those who loved you learn

to navigate the sudden geography

of a life with you-shaped holes.
Your favorite song plays on the radio

in a car where someone weeps,

remembering how you hummed along,

fingers drumming the dashboard.
The morning after is not an ending—

it's the first day of everyone else

learning to carry the weight

of all your unfinished stories.