Looking for the “watermelon girl” from Sam’s Club earlier. I thought you looked like you were planning a party, but maybe you just really liked fruit. I watched you put six melons in the cart and then make a call. You nodded and held the phone between your cheek and shoulder, adding seven more melons to the cart. One of them dropped and rolled towards me. I picked it up and gave it to you, joking, “Have enough yet?” (Stupid joke, sorry) You responded, “I hope so. She always loved melons.” Then I noticed the tears on your face. I left you to finish your conversation.

Anyway, I was the guy with the bad joke and the brown hair. Wearing a green button down and blue jeans. You were the girl with dark curly hair and a blue dress. And the watermelons.

I hope it ended up being enough. I hope you see this.

head to toe kissing


I   the mundane

moonlight madnesses, a possessive noun,
commissions gravitational pulls that disobey and obey
laws of interstellar loving. The antique modalities once and forever, forever laying still, stilled in places of antiquities and historical need, are thundershower and hail rudely reawakened, the undertow of
pull and push, the yanking hands  of need for others, for others,
it’s the explosive-knowledge, the opening of the old kitbag of perpetual principles, that crazy head to toe kissing is no less necessary, more so, than the computation of the total breaths mundane, unnoticed even now as I write of them, that we will count from that very first, in deed, they are one and the same, like the same
kisses given from head to toe

II   the profane

at the first, the body insists, I am but a long haul trailer, no taxi me,
cargo and passengers, are my quatrain accompaniments,
traveling companions boon, my own toons, too soon disembarked,
songs of parents and lovers, children and others, your visage passed
without your permission, but with your happy encouragement,
to generations that will see things that futurists dare not
even mention, but the profane urge to warn them all, kisses from head to toe, elevates, and overcomes...so when most of my names dusted with forgetfulness, lost in the waves, my scorching soft lips will be recalled just as an airy flight of light brushing upon a newborn’s eyelids just at the moment of birth.  A rustling more felt than heard, the ****** and bruised carrying body will sensate and instantly forget, but nonetheless transmit genetically, that the profane of birth and life renewing can be only washed away, when past and future, recalled and recreated, kisses from head to toes, dripping with softening saltwater tears, a chemical organic reagent of creation,
inside the histories of head to toe kissing

III  the insane

so when, somewhere, some place, a man’s body prepares  
tous ses adieux, his memory foolishly sane and strong,
his wasted paper bag container ship, rust bucketed,
crinkled and wrinkled, skin folding in on itself, hanging to bones
by stretched sinews and tendons that no longer tend to business,
loosened and gangly, they hang on barely to the bare nakedness of
evolutionary processes, mostly not, offset, by the tenderizing effects of kisses, from invisible attendees,  unconscious they,
willingly and unwillingly, offering farewells in actuality...
head to toes, noses to belly buttons, tatted, tattered, and still tasted by dying cells.  It’s insane to think it’s even possible  one retains each and all, but he does, those few given, those few  millions he gave away for cheap belly laughs and poems, decade upon decade accumulated are the totality of him, all of them free and sealed in kisses from head to toes

Mother God planted the seed of joy in me but I am still at war with what eternity entails,
sugar peaches kissed in sunless shades,
the fruits of heavens melt evermore,
cosmic outburst at the limit of human perception,
come, steal my fashion, besiege my immortality.

my days are longer without you near
the sun sets slower, and my nights stay darker
the clock is ticking but I feel no remnant
I drag my feet behind me with my chin to my chest
kicking up dust with my shoes
what I live is a pattern of monotony
a constant loop of never-ending tedium
the rising and setting of the sun is all the same
it’s a pointless cycle of idle moments
sitting still instead of doing
each hour is a broken record catching on its hinge
it doesn’t move forward, but neither backward
not until I spend my days next to you
because seconds last longer when I’m not with you

this blissful morning,
i woke up to birds chirping,
trees rustling,
bells resonating
across my bedroom.

how lovely nature is
like music to my ears.

the earth has music for those who listen.