Love is just a word
That I sometimes hear whispered

Echoing through the soul
I left buried somewhere off in the distance

The only smile I know is trapped in these fading pictures
Pills, potions, and mysterious mixtures

A feeble attempt to **** the feeling quicker
Of loss and loneliness

The heart is home is it?
To me a cage where I lock away

Each and every drop of pain
Yet my lips are stained when I speak your name

The tears you cry
Fill my cup with rain

Just one more sip before I drift………

The conversation lasted into the
long tooth hours of the night.
She read her textbooks and then heard a mouse with its tail barely caught in a glue trap. It squealed as if it were dying. In my heart I believed it was savable. In the agony I imagined him dreaming of fields and insects and seeds.
She had these cold gray eyes.
In one quick movement, she took off
one of her clodhoppers and smashed its brains out. She cleaned her shoe with a tissue, she said, I neither hate the mouse nor love it, it's just a thing.  At that moment I was pretty sure she was psychotic.
We're both drunk, I kept watching her *** in that tight  black dress.
She said in a very automated voice, I suppose you want to **** me now and then slithered out of the dress.
***** is *****
But I couldn't do it. I told her to put her clothes back on and not **** anything on the way out.

the moths ate holes
in the silk of my hands
your touch falls through them
like black volcanic sand

The earth moves
according to its natural principles -
I love you according to mine.

Youth has left us so quickly -
the sun was once
a sweet saffron bolus
we swallowed so eagerly
fat day after day.

Now it's a quiet yellow *****,
that chokes on its own easting and
goes down like a horse pill in the west.

Instead, we are with moon -
I pull you close sometimes in tide,
then you're away waning, waning -
doldrums, tantrums.

If only I could swing low over you,
in your green rain town,
& not be pushed away.

It's no longer easy
to share the days with you.
I fill with ulcers
that bleed all into me,
the body the echo of the mind.

But I love you on natural principles -
you have touched my life all over.
Where I go, I bring you;
you are still the voyage home,
even when your replies come
so terse and lacking invitation.