if hell is where you love - yet heaven where you are at peace: where, i ask - would you rather be?

why doesn't this word exist: SOLEMNOUS...
"borrowing" from solemnity...
"borrowing" from... ah... because there was
the man of sorrows, woes...
there is the sorrowful...

i dared to think there might
be a solemnous man...
then again it's much simpler:
since... i have become the solemn man...

what does, solemn mean?
formal and dignified...
categorized by
deep sincerity...

         -ly: added to solemn invokes:
with: deep sincerity...
hardly a case for a heart of a naive child:
by now, aged 37...
i have aged to actually appreciate
a sincerity of Christmas...

i shouldn't have to make this public...
but i will make it public anyway...

        i thank with all my heart
             for bringing Edie into my life...
i can't forgo thinking aloud
an arrangement with fate
very much akin to the Duke of Windsor
and that of Wallis Simpson...

perhaps i've been binging on watching
the Crown and feel immense sentiment
for the man...

regardless...
finally a love less and less like that of tumultus
youth of changing each other
or jumping through hoops...

no longer an empty Christmas
no longer stationed with duty to an immediate
family... that ship has long
sunk and what remains is three
people on a raft...

the rest of family being crushed by
both death and modernity
and the luxuries the latter afforded each
to dissolve through the death of the last
patriarch in the shadow
of Franklin - the great grandmother,
guard of the kindergarten
the delivery man of lemonade
using a horse and cart...

              i only hope and perhaps i might
even begin to usher in a practice of prayer:
for me to be united with Edie
and Reyla for next Christmas...
even apart: yet a quick telephone call
and i'm there...

and i'm there with a quick snap of the fingers
and a shake of the wallet for
a £700 ticket from London Heathrow
via Anchorage to Honolulu...
a lifetime apart, unknown to either of us
a me or a you or a we as i-to-i...

terrible affair, love... so freely available
so freely given, so unabashedly willing to loiter
to lessen the pains of distance...
yet only loiter on the surface, yet...

how dexterous these hands with this
heart like a sponge...
        how easily to give love to know one can:
also receive     like-for-like...

no longer bound to poetry
   no longer threatened by family or by youth
or by expectations of muddled forensics of
societal norms...
threateningly unabashed:
a threateningly friendly: by my will
            i cannot otherwise...
                          disguise...

even with the throng of badly burnt men
who spew red pill black pill white pill blue will
as if the Matrix could be the only analogy
to a philosophy and how men
and women relate...

operation sirloin steak:
an imminent attack from Norway
establishing a colony on the coast of Scotland
by way of decoy:
to begin major work on canal building
under the English channel...
or at least that's the immediate
reading of Edward VIII sympathising intrigue...

quiet openly: these days you can be working
in England with colleagues
who are sympathisers of Vlad Putin
who have come from Sudan
to re-educate almost everyone from the continent
in post-colonialism...

          so it's not everyone is going
to get of scoff free...
for all that modernity affords us,
                    it still can't give us sufficient evidence
that...
heaven is a place where we can love...
that love is not a torturous liberation
from the stifling affairs of keeping at peace...

i do not consent to a heaven by dictates of peace
and angelic boredom
   while fascinated by a child-god
fascinated in turn by geology, dinosaurs
and the planets...

               for that matter time...

in hell and in love i'd rather reside...
         and perhaps tortured by being bored by women...
i can't imagine anything greater
than... pretending to be bored by women.