Let me lay down in the bed of poetry
you keep underneath
the soft curves of your skin
and let me sleep in
until it is time to dream again

let your smile be the sun
and the moon and the sky
forever painted black and blue
and bruised with the brush strokes  
of love lost and found
and fought for and kept

weave the magic in your pulse
into the madness of my heartbeat
and spill your words of blood and anguish
and sorrow and triumph
into the silence of the conversation
between the color and wonder
of your eyes gazing hypnotically
into the horror and the void
and monsters living
in the dark pools of mine

build bridges between
the broken pieces of me
and the stars you keep
under your skirt
and we will live in our own universe
where everything hurt
has a place to find comfort
and every comfort knows
the way back
from the place where we hurt

where dreams know that nightmares
are part of the stage and the play
and that life even in death
must always go on
and should we forget our lines
we just need to listen
to the song of the leaves
and the words in the wind

we will be the forest
and the bears and the wolfs
and the dragons and the clouds
and the fire and the howls
and the fairy and the tale
and the language we make up
as we write poetry underneath
the beds of our skin

I am falling into
a blue hole in my soul
full of the sea
descending

this emotional deepscape
so far under my knowing
makes of me a wanderer --
a discoverer --
of my abyssal, hidden soulsea

thus it is, to be untethered
falling to magical
places
where deepwater hot springs
bloom
falling into deep water
where grow corals
and vent animals
odd, rare species
unknown to me

the soul pressure ---
intense
the soulwater ---
murky and warm
the soul life ---
lit from within


c. 2017 Roberta Compton Rainwater

In the black spheres of another’s cavernous
eyes I lost myself amidst the seep of my own
light patterned into strange foreign orbs

drinking heavily of I
am borne on the winds of imagined hands
sculpting me awake. where I can dream-in
the voids between lust, where the nothing
seems happy, the night is my friend

in the convex meniscus of another’s iris
perhaps I can dream of rebirth in the titrating
wound in the womb of lust

makes my eyes search the ether. In the
womb of my lust there is wind in my wings.
In the womb of my lust there is more

to be found. to be woken into equilibrium
perhaps I must abandon the forked tongue
of independence, so that fanged loneliness

can die of happiness. the snake becomes
a docile bird when fed. the castle of self
becomes a womb in the kingdom
of entwined, sleeping hands. we are born

many.

your soul is a
citadel of the forgotten
a treasury of needs
and wants
a secret of which you have no reck
anymore

shall I find it
for you?
shall I open it
using the key in my heart?

or the lost one in yours?


c. 2017 Roberta Compton Rainwater