Your tilted head
shifted your waterfall hair
to the left.

In a stream of beguiling blonde
ripples,
your chest was met with a dry splash of gold,
real gold.

Technology at your fingertips,
HTML scripts morphing
into long sentences, bouncing in grammar and not stopping
until you take another breath, another
sip from your coffee cup of bitter death- one sugar, no less.

Daunt Books bag beside your chair’s side,
the faithful mute mule carrying
your words and notes and probably an umbrella too,
it’s raining outside and I wish for you not to get wet.

A summer’s hand on bewildered torso chest,
her love: the best kept secret since their escape
to Brest that time in Spring,
Northwest France with its untamed waves lapping at the
hull of The Sea King in the harbour, half mast.

But with every try, harder than the last,
he did not respond to her see-through glass
appeals for an apology-
over two-hundred-and-seventy-minutes
wasted on the TGV back to Paris,
a holiday cut short by her wandering knees,
wide apart in another man’s apartment.

For money was passed in sweating palms
for a day’s encounter with her good looks and charms,
though the men never knew
about her man back at home,
designing the new tourist information
for a cheap weekend-stay in the heart of Rome.

What he bought to the marriage:
stability, safety, security and their baby.

What she bought to the marriage
mainly tears and daily anxiety.

But they both knew the complications
and the clauses of her contract,
agencies would delve deep into the contact’s history
to make sure they were legit,
but it never hid the fact that she had
intimate encounters in hotel honeymoon, champagne, new linen suites.

And we rang along those river banks
against the light cast as shadows,
fleeting past mournful dark windows-
timid in the evening's morning.

And you whispered into my eyes
the words you wanted me to see,
and showed them to idle ears
who waited for something else appear.

Open internet bookmarked pages,
creased and cut newspaper pages
and what do you find laying there?
Lies! Written and typed white lies
that can change the minds of men
and the diet restrictions of nervous, plump women.

I know what is real, I think:
          1. Gradient blue skies that are swiped across the Cambridge ceiling at night. They are real.
          2. The feelings you feel for those you have felt feelings for. They’re real
          3. Falling hail and wet shoes, socks moist with Spring’s choice of weather. That was real.
          4. Falling shrapnel of the Boston Bombs that embedded themselves into the tired thighs of  marathon runners running upon high. That was real.
          5.  This poem may well be real, but I haven’t the guts to say in concrete-words that it matters in the grand scheme of things. This might not be real, I regularly think.

May many more manuscripts
find their way to your hands,
your pen,
that slightly chewed pencil sharpened down
to its end.
            Let emails fill and grace and glide into,
            and over, your mailbox,
            all for you to wake up in
            sheer ecstasy’s shock,
            because you’ve just found out
            there’s work to be done.
                        Allow this doing to be your undone;
                        go out conscious and naked into
                        the hazy summer’s sun
                        and dance, for goodness sake,
                        dance woman! as if a newborn
                        locked away in your womb depended on it.