My love is vast and infinite,
Heart falling fast and intimate.

My love is strong and powerful,
Not feeling wrong or sorrowful.

My love is deep and without bounds,
It’s yours to keep as it surrounds.

My love is real and forever,
Our kisses seal us together.

My love is you and yours alone,
No love more true I’ve ever known.

An autumn leaf, once so green and so full
Fallen, dried, trampled in broken pieces.
A blade of grass, green, slender and alone,
Uprooted, lifelessly floating away.
A flower, once bright and full of nectar,
Wilting, pale, petals heavy on the stem.
A ravaged elm, as tall as it once was,
But hollow, gray, refuge for emptiness.
A shell, home to life, spit out by the sea,
Cracking underfoot, dead, a mere object.
Me, strong in spirit, alive and grateful,
More dead than those things, if not for your love.

The whirring ceiling fan first sound I heard,
Low hum of traffic outside my window,
Pictures on my wall still bleary and blurred,
Cheek warm and damp from head on my pillow.

This is the moment when life awakens,
Senses still calibrated to my dreams,
Haven’t yet moved but feeling I’m shaken,
Wrapped in the embrace of the world’s extremes.

Beauty! You can’t be escaped or denied!
Beauty! Once seen you will never depart!
Beauty! You came and I locked you inside!
Beauty! You are what I see with my heart!

Beauty! Here from sunsets to sunrises!
Beauty! You! Who my love realizes!

If I met my soul, wandering…
Would I even know who it was?

What of me would I recognize?
The pimply skin of teenage years?
Who says it has my color eyes?
My wrinkled face so on in years?

Walking with my familiar gait?
Which of my many styles of hair?
Would my soul dress in clothes I hate?
Or look like me enough to stare?

I’m not familiar with my soul.
Life’s only constant that I get.
The very thing that makes me whole
I’d ignore if we ever met.

My soul’s the me that I can’t see.
Strange here but in Heaven clearer.
To know my soul with certainty,
Know myself without a mirror.

To love is to wonder, “What is wonder?”
To find myself lost in, her eyes of green,
To quake from my heartbeat, strong as thunder,
Dreaming that she loved me, what would it mean?

To love is to wonder, “What is wonder?”
To never unsee, her angelic face,
Utterly helpless, her spell I’m under,
Could I feel her love, held in her embrace?

To love is to wonder, “What is wonder?”
To not have her image, out of my sight,
But not let this dream, tear me asunder,
Dream she’s in love with me, all day and night.

To love is to wonder, “What is wonder?”
To vanish in love, the moment she looked,
A love forever, that never shunned her,
Wonder, O wonder, on her love I’m hooked.

My voice cries out from forced silence,
Thunderous volume in my ears,
Words preparing to do violence
Against my fear to face my fears.

The times I spoke I have been heard,
But poetry’s not for today.
The world needs action, not a word,
Though I’d prefer to run away.

I wish my writing would suffice
So that I never have to be.
But still, I make this sacrifice
Real life needs the real me.

O silent voice, speak through my pen!
A spirit to articulate!
You will be heard, not if but when!
O voice, it’s you I cultivate!

If he resists his tendency
To inhabit his fantasy,
Would he welcome reality,
Over his made up tragedy?

Open to let his eyes be true,
Perceiving real as something new,
Made to feel life like his dreams do,
When dreaming is all that he knew?

To live for real to no avail,
His fantasies would never fail.
He kept the world behind a veil,
No real people matched his tale.

You’d say all his fantasy does
Is fantasize imagined flaws.
He’d love the real him because
He was fantastic as he was.

A broken heart is
A heart
That hasn’t forgiven
Yet.

Your forgiving heart is
A heart
That hasn’t recovered
Yet.

Your recovering heart is
A heart
That hasn’t loved enough
Yet.

Your loving heart is
A heart
That can’t be broken again
Yet.

A broken heart is
A heart
That doesn’t really exist.
Yet.

Beneath the paleness of the autumn sky,
The tired ground takes respite from the heat,
Life departs with green of leaves fallen dry,
Barren and ready for growth to repeat.

Cold wind crackles against the branches bare,
And mornings now too quickly greet the night,
While the birds and butterflies disappear,
Warm raindrop kisses wet with chilling bite.

The weight of the gray air wilts the flowers.
Have pastels washed away for evermore?
Weary nature calls upon its powers
And from its weakest point starts to restore.

I shield my eyes in refuge from the cold,
Imagining the life there is to mourn.
Then I’ll recall the lesson nature told.
You need a little death to be reborn.