Two years old, he totters towards his mutti's skirts
She turns away, for the decanter, and locks him in his room
Oh! He wails, pounding his little fists against the floor,
But she finds him asleep on the rug, clutching an old poppet to his breast
She lifts him to his crib and kisses his sodden cheek, checking her abuse at the door
Her smile is smug, folded away into her adulteration of love.

Five years old and he asks after his sire,
Tracing the beading of her mourning dress, as she kneels with him
As if he were a snake and she was stricken,
she drops him squat on the cold floorboards. Pulls herself within,
Then reaches to him,
Whispering condemnation and condolence
He backs away, burning his hand on the fire grate, the love in his eyes as dim.

When he is seven, the boy takes up a twisted love for architecture, swears he'll become a sailor, far from home
Her eyes are a cooling, somber grey-blue, they alight then smolder with a hiss
The boy's eyes are green, flush with life and innocence
They're his .

My child, my lover,
Come away to discover
Continents far and new!
To love and to sigh,
To dream and to die
In a land as exotic as you!
Humid suns wink
Behind cloudy skies
So alluring and charming
So strangely alarming
With crocodile lids blink
Like the tears in your eyes.

There, all is order, beauty and leisure
Luxury, calm, quiet and pleasure.

Wood panels beaming
Polished and gleaming
Would decorate our room;
The rarest of flowers
In the height of their bloom
We’d while away the hours
Inhaling amber in our lungs,
Walls with deep mirrors hung
Our souls would feast,
On the wonders of the East
Whispering a sweet native tongue.

There, all is order, beauty and leisure
Luxury, calm, quiet and pleasure.

The aqueducts have, nestled,
In a drowsy slumber
With vagabond vessels
Lined unencumbered
Their sails unfurled
They come from the ends of the world.
- The twilight sky clouded
Leaving pastures shrouded,
The canals, the entire town,
Glows amber and blue;
The night falls down
In a soft, warm hue.

There, all is order, beauty and leisure
Luxury, calm, quiet and pleasure.

It was a quiet afternoon of reminiscing
Nostalgia lingered in the sunlit air
intermingling with the sweet aroma of coffee
as I sipped and leaned back in my chair

˜
He walked up to me as I sat by the window
I waited to see what he wanted to say
“Your skin is the color of my mocha’, he smiled.
‘Just a notch deeper than your café au lait.’

°
With his jet black hair and Mediterranean eyes
And a physique worthy of a prize winning stallion
His confident air and his subtle smirk
He had to be greek, or maybe a charming Italian

˜
Long hair in a messy bun that didn’t care
jeans ripped in strategic places
His gaze never left my quizzical eyes
obscuring everyone else’s faces

°
He waited for me to respond
mere seconds since his saunter
Forever engraving in my mind,
This coffee shop encounter…

All day I've been imagining an alternate universe, where half of the people in the world are never hurt. They can trip and fall, or touch a hot stove, and they never feel it.
The other half feel twice as much. They are linked to one of the others, and whenever they trip and fall, this person feels it. They stub their toe, and this guy feels the pain.
It's an interesting thought. How many people would just assume they were invincible, and blindly walk through life not knowing or caring? I think some people would be extremely careful, so as not to hurt their partner, but others who like pain would do the opposite.
What if your partner was a starving child in Africa? They felt invincible, but you felt their pain. Who wants to bet that poverty and disease would be gone in five years?
It's leveling the playing field, to an extent. If a rich guy feels the pain of a starving child, or the snow on a homeless person's skin, don't you think he'd help, even if it was for selfish reasons?
I don't think the world would do well if this was how it worked. There would always be people that hurt themselves on purpose just to hurt others, or the people who commit suicide, and two people die. But wouldn't it be an interesting experiment?