A prim, lavender skirt and a napkin on it,
Tells me this is serious, and I mustn’t
Rain upon it, not say what I think,
And much less what I feel.
You have found a lover
And she isn’t me,
I wish I was an eel
That could glide away
Into the primordial sea.

On second thought, it makes me
Wish that we had never met,
That I’d never looked at you and loved,
Or at least never brought you home.
It was there that it all began;
I assumed your were mine alone,
And now I am empty man.

Oh, my love,
For the first time in my life!
You did this to me,
Without knowing, charmed me
Until I was undone.
But accidents will happen;
It was only hit and run;
Such investigative fun!
Don’t tell the other one I feel this way.

On second thought let him…..
Follow me into danger
Since a gamble is good as a rest,
Or the off chance I’ll get shot.
After all, this admirer’s the best
Of a mediocre lot.

But he knows about me, I’m sure.
He’s gets so little reward,
But takes credit for what I do
And hangs upon my every word.
He listens to me in the dead of night
As you used to do.
It’s comforting that he’s not you.

-Unfinished Lament

Time slips backward over little slivers
Of love and broken lives,
Gathering them up, using the soft mess
Of once-blessed feeling mixed with
Grand passion,
Until it knits together the pieces of
Hate and love like a potion:
Unseemly, neither black nor white...
And we refuse to see it.

Time rolls forward as we ignore it,
Over hurt as well as joy,
For we have taught ourselves to lie,
To say that nothing matters in
The “grand scheme of things”...
And so our life passes us by.

Until, one day, we discover
We are alone even as we stand
Beside those we love.
And we know them not.
Where love resides,
There loathing and resentment
Peek from amidst the ruinous
Muddle, which we created,
Simply unaware.

We two may stare into each others’ eyes,
As if two strangers,
Wary of false hopes and lies.
Stale passion bonded to forgotten vows
Leave us helpless, caught in a patterned
Web of half-truths and hidden threat.

Soon we are reduced to stiff civility,
“Sly apologies and polite regrets”.
Love dies more slowly than the ability
To end the dance or forget.
We settle in, like corpses in a crypt,
To the slow departure of ourselves.

As the mind rises up above the scene,
We take it in, gawkers on a highway,
Aghast yet unable to refrain
From still more self-flagellation.
Another empty day drags by
And in our lonely, separate prisons…we stay.


Rediscovered on January 20, 2019