I awaken this morning with you lingering
on the verge of my tongue, not your salty -
sweet sweat, but the unswallowable mention
of your name. I want desperately to consume
the mmmm's that flowed from my lips just
moments before the alarm jolts me to reality.
Try as I might, the aaaaahhhhh's won't digest either,
Nor the taaa taaa taaa's. I gasp.

It always starts this way when you are gone:
I curl into your invisible muscular arms, wrap legs
around firm nothingness and pretend that you are here.
I bury my face into your scent-laden pillow and inhale deeply.
The memory of our ******* is as implanted on ebony sheets
as it is in the cavernous walls of my mind. Your hands don't cease
to caress thighs and calves, nor your lips to flick ***** *******
just because you are away. This is how enmeshed we are.

Vaguely lit by the summer moon,
lull them asleep among the foliage;
her sweet madness: the devil's paladins
lie in wait for more than a thousand years.

In the wine of daylight, they slip amorously.
- A nest of mad kisses, the beads of their love.
They have murmured their ballad - the paladins dance,
sighing around her, women and flowers beneath them.

Smile of beautiful lips, a small rustle of wings -
it is the nymph! Her great veil rises;
such mounting of my soul in love’s will;

As I float down, bearing shadow-flowers with them,
I never endured more triumphant clamourings -
gleams of the daylight:
dawns are heartbreaking, devoured by vermin.

As I open the door to leave,
I glance up and down the street
until I spot you, your black silhouette
contrasted by the light post , watching me.
You’ve been there every night for weeks,
always just as I am leaving for work,
the graveyard shift at the diner.
And you follow me, from across the street
the entire four blocks from home to work
and then, you disappear until morning.

My co-workers amuse themselves over this.
Some say you are a stalker, others say you
are a secret admirer but too shy to say “hello”,
one claims that you are merely a figment
of my imagination; they laugh and chuckle
while I nervously work my shift, wondering
Will he come in tonight or will I just see him
when the dawn breaks?  And sure enough,
just as the sun begins to peek over the rooftops,
there you are, across the street, all in white now,
sitting on a park bench, watching and waiting.

she thinks I am not listening,
her breath upon my neck,
so she pitches me 'zines:
ALLURE, allure me?

she lures me to beaches:
soft amber sand
settles in valleys
between toes and heels;
tanned images dance;
a lounging goddess shimmers ~
ebony strands weave lace,
pattern after pattern,
into a creamy satin gown;
sapphire laps flames
from her eyes to mine,
mesmerized.

the caption reads:
only the finest *** comes from Puerto Rico.

Hands busily stitch patterns in and out,
five sets on each side of a long board.
I, with the youngest hands, watch and listen
with intent to the elder women of my family.

Janie now has her last child; no boys to carry
the family line on to the next generation.
Tom, like his father's father before him,
has survived his first year of the Marines.
Ginny has divorced again, the third time,
with the fourth child for Aunt Gladys to raise.

Their hands, experienced in fine stitchery,
never skip a line, lightly sketched upon satin.
Their eyes rarely know what their hands do.
Like instincts of childbirthing, these women know
when to say this square has had all its stitches,
and then move on the next one.

Their lives are like that, moving in and out,
slowly building one link to another,
holding their children to them with fine thread.

The Path up and down is one and the same.
~Heraclitus~*

Through dusty books,
pages as brittle as peanut candy,
I search for wisdom
among the Greeks;
question the meaning of life.

On distant shelves,
among cobwebs and boewevils,
fiery sagas shadow
the lives of lustful Gods,
tribulations of mortals
and destructions of nations
once as powerful as the Gods
they worshiped.

I diligently catalogue:
fill page after page
with lore and legend,
trace paths of ancient ones ~
their bones telling tales~
until I realize nothing has changed.

I too spin tales,
yarn of sagas rich as the Greeks,
worship Gods and muses,
like my own broken-spirited muse,
a Simberg angel.

Someday, I will join weavers of old,
and searchers of knowledge
will dust away webs of my tales
and realize that I am but one,
and yet, the same.

He opens the drawer to the desk his father once owned,
that antiqued monolith from a man he never knew,
and removes a sealed, crusted envelope, his father's name
neatly penned in his mother's refined script.
He carefully slides the yellowed letter from the envelope,
unfolds it, and lays it upon the desk. As he smoothes
wrinkles from it, he reads the contents slowly, savors
the words like he once savored his mother's homemade fudge,
allowing the prose to seep into his mind
like the mellifluous melting of chocolate down his throat.
As his mother's words resound through his mind,
he recalls the austere diction of her voice,
the matter-of-fact, demanding pitch that he, as a child,
cringed in corners, hands over his ears to drown out the harshness.

The words he now reads upon faded gold sheets,
the tone of one in love, an air of magnetism and dignity,
are not words the mother he knew would convey.
And he ponders the man who left her,
why he never opened the letter from his wife,
if his coldness froze the flames of this woman
leaving her as frigid in life as she was in love.
And he wonders of the man knew a son was left behind
to pick up the icicles which fell from his mother's eyes
each time she gazed upon the photo of her husband.

He folds the letter and places it back inside the envelope,
lays it on top of a stack of his mother's mementos,
and as though to return passion to his own life,
tosses the entire contents into a waste basket, ignites
the icy memories of his family's past and watches
as flames rise, consumes, and turns them to ash.