I didn't see it coming;
I expected nothing else.
Thirteen years old, hiding behind the rules
so I didn’t have to face
that shortcoming, that missing piece.

Once I had accepted limitation as
the sublime:
something that would come in time.
The constraints, then, gave it meaning,
deciding who says what.
Syntax is rules, and rules are limitations.
Without them, we are-- what?

But in time I came to want it,
that freedom to--
I traded "pressure to not" for "pressure to do".
Peering through the rhetoric,
I ventured into the upper reaches, and
I came apart.
There was nothing to hold me together
in this elevator, its yellowed walls crumbling away.

“Not all freedom is good. You can have terrible freedom.”
Was it the mother or the Aunt that said this?
Or Friedrich “entsetzliche Freiheit”--

Ah, Schiller.
What of the Mrs? Did she have freedom
in her husband, in Richard F.?
More freedom in the
(****-and-) (ball-and-) chains
than in the haze of youth?
The most, then, (it can be presumed)
from her departures: first to Alaska,
then even farther north, from where none return.

As freedom dissolved into expectation,
itself now another limitation, I wondered.
Which had it worse:
the woman (machine) outside the yellowing elevator walls,
or the girl (ghost) pacing within?

you’re hard candy, a strawberry and vanilla lollipop, too tempting to resist, lounging by the pool in a too small bikini for your age, looking up at me through your heart shaped sunglasses, nubile and perfect, no longer a girl, not quite a woman, still sweet, still innocent, your blue eyes sparkling as i kiss forbidden lips

Favorite word: “nymphet”, but no!
Halcyon, a kind of drug, you know.
Searching through the pages’ mist
And imagined deeds
Of poets’ needs…
I found my favourite word,
As asked,
Neither sacred nor profane
That describes the Venetian rain
In my beloved’s eyes
And the Florentine sun upon her hair:
“Auburn, russet, mythopoeic”.
Oh, it is not fair,
To liken an object
Of my lust and love
To anything as mortal as autumn air!
Nor “October’s orchard Haze”;
She had her own
Inscrutable, premeditated ways!
Rather let me say that she was perfect,
Though her eyes, pale and myopic,
Her shuffling gait and
Graceless limbs, to them Grace lends
Fey charm, the power to mend
My suffering and
Delusions of a poet’s end
As anything but pathetic,
(Her mother’s fondness for vague emetics)
And I left softly hanging,
On a girl’s new taste,
A tang of russet apples on her face,
But no, not that, the sum
Of my love, My Lo!
Then her bleak demise, partly by my hand
That none of you brutes could understand;
The pure love,
So sadly consummated,
Between a lover
And the one she hated
Yet loved once with inexplicable delight,
On one stolen, frightened night…
In which the two of us agreed
To satisfy a simple, yet maniacal need,
And then depart…
But I could not,
You see;
She was my life,
My love, my heart.

Humbert Humbert 1950

Sharon Talbot ca. 2005

Light of my life,
The slings and arrows
Of outrageous fortune
Bloom a rose
In the deeps of my heart.

And so I came forth
But could not behold the stars.
The slings and arrows,
They trespassed upon my thoughts.

And I cried that I came
To this great stage of fools,
But it echoed loudly within me
Because I am hollow at the core.

That outward existence which conforms,
This inward life which questions
Confusion now hath made his masterpiece of.  

I don't exactly know
What I mean by that,
But I mean it.

Blue meet grey
In the brief flash
Of a mutual gaze
Before eyes fall back
To the littered ground
Hands clasped tight
Toes are twitching
Man and girl
Sitting in careful, practiced non-existence.

Winged migration
to flee from migraine
irritations:

I was the shadow
of the waxwing slain,
flung and flew through
wire flues on the roofs

To be some happier
glove, not on hand

i dream about
that girl
that girl
who can wear that
dress
and smoke
after school

she can let her
hair down
even on the hot days
and let it fall
and dance
on the small of her back

she breaths in
the lethal fumes
that don't even touch her
her porcelain skin
too taut to let the
poisons in

she sits and lets
the sun melt on her face
as she lays on the freshly
cut grass
the boys staring
and her not caring

i sit and stare
at that girl
who sits and stares
right back at me
through the smoke
of my infinite
dreams