I smell the wind-whipped breeze of
A thousand sun-kissed days,
Breathe the crumbling masses
Of a million broken stars,
Hear the hushed, blank cries
Of a billion swollen hearts,
And taste the bitter tears
Of the whitecapped ocean
Beneath your chest-hugged legs.

This amalgam of hues on
A blank paper page is
Nothing but a wistful image,
A reflection of a dying moment,
A passed eon in the midst of
What’s left, gone, seen,
But I faun over it, dote its
Tacit candor, glide my
Chilly soul over it,
Disillusioned, unaware of
The face behind the blue eyes,
The dark, flowing hair,
The slender figure hunched over
A granite island in the midst of the
Green and gray canyons,
Like a perched hawk over
A boulder-faced mountain,
And I find that I’m falling
In love with you,
With the scent of the past,
With the novel sagacity stuck
On your cherry-licked lips,
With the sun’s golden fingers
That caress the water’s surface
Like a silken stare at the
Edge of a lush green meadow.

But tell me, my thorny rose,
Am I not falling in love
With your unproven allure,
Your fixated transience,
Your deceiving honesty?
Can I truly be in love
With an image, an obstinate replica,
Without having felt the loneliness
Of longing, unblinking glances
With your impalpable reality?

Tell me, my heart,
And don’t feed me bitter lies,
Can I love what’s but only a wish,
An enigma that visits me
When I drift away with the rising tides?