Old married man
3 February 2023

When we sit together, holding hands,
When you kiss me, make me smile,
When love overwhelms me? a mile,
Sacrifice your freedom for me,
This old man wants you on his knee.

Shivers, passion, loving all your charms,
Hearing that, you love me, my arms,
Tremor-like a boy on first date.
Like a teeny standing at your gate,
Impatient nowhere I can gentle wait.

I only met you late in life, Match Ave.
Not knowing how much we would have.
Grateful lucky for each moment where,
Our time we can our life share.
Thank you for a second ever second fair,
Adventure that we fare and dare.

Journeys hold the challenge, keep us alive.  
Your love sweetest gift on which I thrive.
Perhaps I hold you closer, tighter,
That any man should keep right.
Watching you sleeping each night
When you dream and stir in fright,
I kiss,  touch your shoulder light.
Caring, old married, I care.
Old married man, soul bare.

13 Pearls
In the sands of Arabia
12 got lost

Now where is the other

if you go down forgotten streets
where the lights push the nightmares aside

and travel down
some forgotten dreams
to hear the melody
and are drawn in
by the strumming of guitar strings

and there on the stage
a heart walking a wire
with a sad smile of thunder and rain
that rolls you like tumbling dice

and if you believe in love at first glance
and listen with a young heart
you'll hear the wind and stardust
that she's chasing in her song

Bard of my reading, no less
the trail to my heart's desire.
Singing in the crevices of
memory I love you.

Ode to the bark and green
you awaken the song.
Sing to me in the spaces
between rhyme and
desire.

I wait to hold the source
of song, the poem of
you driven to the page
to lap the signs of
tomorrow like evanescent
cotton when spilled in
the wind of your
imagination.

Tomorrow the nascent verse
will spill like water on flowers.
Grow to the top dear Poet,
ride the board of memories

which sing in the lines of
your experience.

Teach me, Sweet Jesus, to
Sing.

Caroline Shank
1.15.2023

Tide arrives

Take a breath,
Deep

Engulfed within the Ocean,
Unconsciousness

Let it

Narcissus nods agreement with
Gentle breeze slipping across
An iced puddle-

Winter and the air feels clean
But is not;
Sun shines bright but is dim

As aeons dictate

there is something good
and some light
in this desire
enraging my cells
with divination chanting
sculpting my shape
in violent curves
I don't recongnize the hues
of mornings
because of frenzy:
the new definition of gravity
along the lines
mesmerizing visions of
softness and caring

love is a whirlwind
in any language
a clear water
so you can see
how translucent
nakedness can be

hers is
the bending of space
to smaller and smaller
atoms of delight,
fusion, diffusion, infusion

it holds you tight
from the very centre
(heart&lungs)
when it breaks you
and then these traces
the swarming of photons
in the fabric of skin
sweet radiance,
energetic warmness
an arch, a cohort of waves
crushing everything
like cherries' sense
reality sense
roads' sense

a scarring refusing
to scream/bleed
defiance of stillness
music of laughter
sun raising in your hands

there is something beautiful
for the poetess in me
it just describes herself well
for the never-day
it transmutes
anything:
beauty into horror
horror into despair
despair into words
even thought into
singing birds