Your inviting caress
was a call for sanity,
but the longing within me
cleverly blocked all paths to reason
and I strayed into a darker world
where ****** pleasure rules
like a hungry dictator,
and there is no escape
from the merciless squad
which fells respect
all too quickly,
leaving a hollowness
worse than death.

Others may not notice you
but I've seen enough of your bandages
to last forever

don't mistake this for bitterness
for I often wonder who tucks you in at night

its just there are so many of you -
some kind of war must be going on

the entire city is a secret battleground
and no one is talking about it
but I see the fear
beneath your silently screaming eyes
and often I want to stop you
and make you tell me

but I am too terrified that one day
I will find my face among yours.

Everything used to be
so personal
its not way now

endless lies surround me
while honesty and feeling
lay strangled by the door,
their rotting corpses
seen only by my eyes

no one else has noticed
the change,
I would be laughed at

I remember one sunny day
when the leaves rustled
in the wind -
I felt so alive

its not that way now

I stopped writing poetry
a lifetime ago
when the world failed
and we all sat around
silently watching
our tiny deaths each day
which everyone denies

if you don't believe me
just look into our eyes.

We will always love each other - we whispered
as we separated indefinitely,
moving outward to a new world
strangely foreign and excited
cold and lonely - all at one moment;

We grew from individual experiences
with infrequent reflection on a closeness once achieved,
a momentary flush of warmth, then perhaps remorse
for a memory incapable of being maintained
by an insurmounting knowledge of the present;

We come together again -
blinding ourselves to the Romanticist's inability
to eternally capture that moment of happiness,
hoping, dare yet praying
that we might succeed where they failed;

We will always love each other, we whispered,
long ago, when we knew no future.

It is disappointing
not to be able to love you,
for visions of a dreamy nether world
where we caress each other
flaunt me endlessly
and I lie awake wishing
that our two hearts could beat as one.

I still want to hear
you loved me well
and then I can stop calling your name
and then I can sleep more peacefully