if writing poems about love!

points to you being in love!

then I am long time smitten!!

They bring with them the baggage of men
the lost children attempting pathetically
to recreate the aura of time long gone.

If you discount the roughness of skin
travel past the thick hedge of beard
penetrate the silt on the eroded eyes
you can delayer the hardened coats
and get to see  faces barely recognizable.

Some were once too close to be missed
their names and all
but most you could hardly recall
and it agonizes your thought
were they in the same class or not.

You smile till your jaws ache
fetching stories from the blue
dazzlingly colored and half true
for they are all in the mood
to joyfully succumb to falsehood.

You could tell from the body language
who's  in the backburner
and who on the front page.

Forty years break and make men
but they feign happiness
to be united again.

I heard the footsteps of your heart
in the cool shade of the evening
as I pondered the North Star.

You hid yourself for shame
but love drew you out
we met beneath the sky.

All your lovers had gone
you stood alone
I bade you welcome.

you have so much to offer
each breath a confirmation
love wishes you here still.

I opened the desk to look at the only photo I have of you
the colors have faded
and the edges are charred
but I don't remember when or how
did I do that at some point in a drunken fit
perhaps to draw my gaze from your beauty
or to symbolize how I was burned
the nights are long here
retired and struggling to find life
trying not to wait for death
you were night and day
love and hate
truth and deception
and in our brief time together
I was more alive than ever before
or since

you haunt me

"Thirty plus years in a
loving happy marriage,
My husband taken
by long illness
and sad ending.

Five years companionless
loneliness endured,
Now a naked man
is in my shower,
I can hear him softly
singing."

Love and companionship
can come at any age.
Rendering you both
whole and renewed again.

They didn't need the sea
nor words
but a ploy to escape
their own dulled image
familiar faces and spaces
weary conversations
a place away
where the mind rested
and silence filled the cracks
healed the holes
to a whole
contented in being there
in the room for two
counting day's pick
smelling dead shells
feeling sea in their cells
and when the night was high
surrendering to sleep.