don’t leave me!
(the leaving is in the writing)

she whispers in his ear,
after they’ve climbed into bed,
their tiring bodies both embraced,
soft sunken into, by, a familiar mattress,
after a sophisticates city night out seeing stars,
stars, human and astral,
city lights dusk heightened the vocal sparking,
singers singing songs of love from
radio days long ago

don’t leave me
she intones, a prayerful demand,
equally a command and a begging behest,
puzzling what prompted this pressed request,
spoken with urgency born in her breast

don’t leave me
drifting off and into his thin place,
but tugged back by this cri du coeur,
unsponsored and unwarranted,
nothing recalled that justly provoked,
a statement topping of anguish and fear

don’t leave me
he repeats in a rising questioning inflecting
puzzling riddling unbefitting a mellow-toning sleepy ingredient,
whatever do you mean, I leave you only
to dream, to purify, refresh and deep rest reset,
and return come morning with new poems,
what angst comes to stir this asking,
delaying my adventure to nightly restoration?

don’t leave me
repeated and repeated, dressed in urgency,
for I see the little things,
the wavering walk, the slowing of the thinking,
the walls, black n’ blue, whining about your into bumping,
the instant eagerness with which your body accepts
your voyage to dream places where
one goes and gone and must go unaccompanied,
some who are chosen and some who choose, not to return

don’t leave me
for the signs are ample, a certain weariness
dresses your face and crowns thy graying mane,
the slight labored breathing from steps once
bounded and leapt, the seeing and the hearing,
each slightly weakening, two orchestral instruments,
together off key and lessened in their triumphal vigor,
these words of mine, a royal guard,
keep them in your dreams

don’t leave me
minor missteps in the elongated negated of dying gracefully,
my tuning forks are sensitized,
and any slowing motion
both visible and hearable, and filed under inevitable

I will not leave you tonight,
my body warming as per usual,
your cold feet intruders indicate it’s you have left
for your own nightly visitors, occasional terrors,
you’ve woken me from my allotted sleep hours,
many poems now retrieving and in need of scribing,
while the fingertip digit flys across the digital keyboard,

I am more alive than I have ever been;
the leaving is in the writing,
each poem a steppingstone,
but the poems come fast and furious,
sometimes two at a time, the muses are bemused,
the prognosis is for thousands more and warn:

do not wear out your olive oil anointed forefinger,
the lubricated pointer of the way, wherein is contained

through that index
finger,
your body of works in the
“yet to arrive, yet untaxed filling station,”,
must be seen to fruition,
for it is only then that,
only love poetry
is ready for long lasting
eternal realization





5:36am 12th April, two thousand nineteen