1
And I just wanted to know, insatiable anticipation,
Just how you keep smiling
While all your teeth show
Stained with all that grief? And though,
Outside, you’re nectarine, just as the
Ducks ‘midst torrents preen and raindrops
Fall fat and unseen, outside
Abide, the open window wide, in clear mien
I see rain falling over glass, replenish, renew
And though you can’t cry,
The world does it for you,
To yourself, you utter a lie, but the world weeps here
For you
Just as I do, though, tears unseen
Separated by some barrier
Between.

Morning:
My taken place at the faucet, a peer
Staring into eyes, not sworn to me
And I was standing, looking in the mirror
Speaking as my reflection
Spoke back to me.
I was shocked when he took my hand
Starting speaking about identity
I was shocked he knew so much
More of me
Than I.
He talked about my too-long hair
Or how good I looked in green
Or how messy my morning face could be
Or whether I was feeling smart or lean.
He knew it all:
I’d go so far to say more of me than I.

Evening:
Look to the east! A sun set
—Bravo! At least consistent and THEN gone.
Me? I’ve no such liberty
I couldn’t even tell, bereft a mirror,
The thing I like to call me.
Walking the roads, lined with lights
Bustling, living,
Lined with sights
Constituting the parts of me, invisible
—Added to nothing, they’re indivisible
Closed, exposed, fall and drizzle
Without the gall keep hold
From doors and boughs
In the windows—I’m there now
And THEN I’m gone.

Night:
The stone church’s door where
The righteous moor their souls
Piety flows
In its golden veins
And I’m there no more.
Their God does hate me
Without presence in the
Pews; I’m dross
Since the saint I chose
Was Saint Me beatified
Confirmed from the sinner Laity Goss
—So I turn
To the school affording play in my words
And a tact therefore
But rejects
All but their templates in blue shoes
Who sleight my for company
Only when within them
Or drowning in *****.
—So I turn
To the wilderness
Blooming in virginal grapes
Disrobed save the skin
Unfamiliar,
Self-aware but only on a whim
And whirlwinds that blow
Ice and shrapnel and
Exile me to the country
Where not but dearth may grow
In a single season of mine
—So I turn
Too afraid of that winter
So much more the fall
And me in the mirror
Knows it all, knows it plenty
A casual drop in a casual chat
About identity
—So I turn
Back to the mirror
Back to it all
With showers and pictures in its wall
Staring into eyes, sworn not to me
Speaking as my reflection
Speaks back to me
I was not shocked he knew so much
More of me than I,
Since he strides alongside mine
And only in a certain climb
Telling me
It’s almost time, I’m almost there
But it’s not clear in which direction,
Or where.

“Take it, take it,” to an ocean I beseech
A phial of hungry glass
“To some distant beach”
Holding within it
All the air from my lungs,
Every heart beat,
Baby teeth and hair
All the domestic days in the Delaware creek
And spare
Time
Rolling in the waves, frothing jaws
Now have the empty bottle
I pause, I curse
That some child of me will
Coddle
In the ever-ceaseless body
Full and empty
As the phial, this thing of matter
Sublime in depth
But empty in purpose
Containing all life
But with heartless curses,
Instilled of placidity
But throbbing with surge
Until, it too, the phial will purge
—Had I known its fate of woe
( A monument! And I let it go!)
—I would have weathered the inevitable
( A monument! And I let it go!)
—Then, at least, there’d be something to show
( A monument! And I let it go!)

We are here
Flames of the oil burn
Red as Passion
Then Black as the midnight
Lighted with the incandescence
In some town home’s
Low light.

We’re alight, aflame
In the hearth of heart
A huge void, nebula
We stars, are apart
While different nights flicker all the same
As planets return from whence they came

Illuminated by the spice of ***
A pact, a covenant with the sun
Burning in a blackened scrim
As though in the void, nebula
Another revolution
Arching to begin

These giants flicker, the souls of my world
These stars I call my friends
To repellant forces we’re linked in defiance
In tenacity
In camaraderie
The laws of physics
Defy US!

By its dictates we can’t know when
That what begins
Must surely end…
But we burn like stars
In the midnight air
And in my scope
And in my sky
Nothing but blackness, infinity there
As long as the earth
And all its stars exist together
I know I can't know
What does not last forever.

1.
Ah, yes. I do remember—in the annuls of the setting sun
Which gazed upon us cloister’d couple
Just as then when this begun—
How lovely you looked to me
When I first stooped to take your hand:
The air was pink from rushing blossoms
Blown as though caught where waves meet sand
Out o’er the horizon’s sea
Of lapis stones and perfect lilies,
Our marble vessel stood calm afloat
As Time she ceased her constant chatter
Our love, on eternity, she thusly wrote.
2.
A promise kept where we abide
I see the spell on you ascribed
As though not a minute since then had died
Our eyes are locked
As is my reverence
Wedded in both hand and Time
Union’d there upon the hill
One constant spirit, forever ‘twine
My hand in yours,
Your eyes in mine
And all the day a vernal eve.
3.
Forever faithful, ‘till we’re parting dust
N’er a band, nor jem’s allure
Compel me from this meeting just
And we’re betrothed
As one amorous, fixed stone
You’re my bride of marble pure
I, your husband, and yours alone.
4.
The snow must fall, but never does
Nor do hands of some final hour
The face of parting averts his glower,
And no such sadness entreats us here,
You only cry the tears of rain,
In concert so do I,
Even our sentiments commune where they ought,
And strain, does not
Our open home, where the live rest peaceful:
Espoused to none but plots and vine
Widowed from both bride and Time,
Pining for that permanence, the comfort of our kind.
For they the living, asleep and buried,
Rejoice at such, our fates prolonged,
For what it is: the stuff of dreams.
From thence, ‘till now, it tarried
And, just as then, you beam.
5.
Your blankened eyes are filled with me,
Not soiled by another sight
Beneath this alter of pallid stone
All I see is placid white:
My eyes filled with thee.
Many a-year may have passed
But we’re indifferent to present, future, past
And though our company is but the dead
They can watch us
Forever, watch us wed.
6.
That august sun, such reverie
Upon it portents I could read
A neverending waxen love
Into that permanence of history wove
That could proclaim, our sentiments same,
Into pink winds, through homes of the dead
The fused seasons through which we tread
Dismissing the failings of human emotion,
Embosoming a steady climb,
Thus envisaging the statue’s notion
That Eros decreed so few would find
Love protected by  Terminus
Its constellation we cusp.
7.
That craft’d on love, transcending this
Oceans of present, future, past
Our ship it sails on maxim, not mast,
A message to all the staring world:
Only a love like ours may last.

I am the snow
In the rains of the March;
The returning flocks to an icy home
—Too bitter to advance, yet too far to return;
The million insect in the fleeing sun
—At blissful risk from a sudden burn.
I emerged (once more) from a shattered winter
My frozen core would never splinter
By grace of storms that built me up
From many unrealized sunny days
To be a summit of hearts dismayed
And from then, here, I stayed.
These warming days retract their touch
As I refuse to melt as much
As kindred of the winter, all
Who grew with me in circumstance.
Yet, this March has in me bred
(Perhaps then, too, I’m in full their kindred)
A space in me, a hole I melt
Dripping with that Spring Emotion
I forgot I ever felt.
Beautiful warms come kissing me
I fear until I’ll wither completely
And lose this body to a formless drop
Evaporating discreetly.
Tho’ the winter from which I’m born
And the ends of rejection I still bear in scorn
I can not go to a new loving Spring
Nor pray to a Winter, more snow to bring
For one only feeds frozen past miseries
The other, this essence, too quick to parch,
Will  do just the same as these
Rains of the March.

I’m not thinking of you
All the time
That’s why you’re (in) my poem again
And a fleeting memory of mine.
Nothing of pith, nor something to question:
Like a simple, transient indigestion.
Though, you were once a wound
--Another shard of glitt’ry ceramic—
Certainly, I’m sure, I’ve healed
While meditating you, the font endemic.
Rest assured, I’ve loosed the bind
Aft’ some disparaged thought
Where I hit the wayside
So I no longer think of you.
…Be certain and clear,
You, gift, once so dear
That I think not of you all the time
You that waylaid
Temper, spirit, and mind
You that effulged the soul of my words
Of romance, of fiction
And other dribble of that kind
You, at my distance, seemed a creature a divine
From, several of my works, your being derived.
In life I could not have
Nor in thought shall I play
(As though thought was of any consequence, anyway),
So, I’m happy to chime
My resistance to doting
And quitted my practices
Of  elegiac sonnets and poetic noting
And no longer think of you all the time
Nor do I lament, nor do I whine
I proclaim that this is…fine
And I assure you, so am I…