Some people call me young
But to others, I am old.
How you see me depends
On the way my impression is sold.

You taught me to love, you taught me to hide,
You taught me to judge, and you taught me to cry.
I have felt joy and have also felt fear,
Tasted the bitterness that is in a tear,
I have risen and I have felt the fall,
In short, with you, I have felt it all.
Yet even in anger, even in pain,
I do not regret and exactly the same, I will do it again.
A lifetime it felt, and a lifetime it was,
Memories undying, it will stay as is, as it always was,
Pure moments of happiness,
Gifts which will always be priceless.

Iris peels back
three generous petals,
ample in exposure,
a gravitationally drawn
dress, *******,
with drops and folds, a downward-
opening, bares elegant anatomy,
stripped from the waist
of a lighter three petals, lifting,
inside, reflective,
reaching skywards, and naked
ribbed with natural frill,
raw with the colours of flower flesh
white tiger stripes
and purple veins,
curling towards the ground like tears
and lifting up like laughter,
with centered yellow streaks
that lead into the heart,
where another tri-petal formation
folds in on itself,
as if to contain some sacred secret
that is gently holding at her *****

    a trinity
    within a trinity
    within a trinity
    of beauty

her naked convolutions coil into
just the right amount of earthly space,
so perfectly held there in the air
with poised and dancing stillness,
the perfect allure
of a delicate goddess,
rooted in the ground
but living also
inside the I,
elevated by the gaze
into limitless imaginal expanse,
no mere flower, in relation
      
                she is
                an entrance
                into love

Grown-ups were supposed
To be good role models; then,
You realize they're not.

I was a soldier once,
and because of the time spent in that world
I thought I knew what suffering looked like.

I thought that because I have smelled death,
  and thrown away the bodies of innocents
like so many empty fruit rinds
  that I was enured to that hole in the earth.

How wrong I was to believe that such things were
the heart of that river

  the darkest I would stare upon,

Unlike some in this world, Simon was not afraid of loneliness, had no need to feel needed, in fact had often wondered how these two women had come burning out of the desert into his private world. He had been a solitary man most of his life, wandering or running from something he wasn't sure. What he was sure of was that he loved these two people whom God or Allah or whomever had placed in his path one day in Tangiers.

He had read the book by Mitchener titled "The Drifters" when he was young, and remembered it now as Ta'ra wept in front of him. Torremolinos was on the other side of the Iberian sure, but the irony of the similarities seemed so poignant that he couldn't ignore it. He put out his hand to this woman, who had travelled so far and for so long she was afraid of what permanency could mean. She made as if to slap him again, and stopped.

"Please. I don't want it to be like this". A bare whisper.

She touched his hand. A hand girls had once thought smooth and soft. No longer.

"I'm afraid."
"I know."

Sitting back down, she picked up the orphaned guitar, and gazing out over Alfalma, she again sang her childhood lullaby. “Çevrem, etrafım şen mutlu iken. Ben yine hüzünlüyüm”.

A girl in France uses a razor against herself in the bathroom between classes, an orphan in Delhi does what he can to provide for his sister, two wanderers find some sort of peace on a balcony in Portugal, and a broken ex-soldier writes about them in America. Where we began, does not have to be where we end, and the lives we touch may never be known to us. But that doesn't mean that who we are, and the joys or the sufferings, are meaningless. We are human, and to be human is to be searching.....

When the low men came for you,
   why did you let them pay fifty solidi for your body?
Why did you not resist them,
   for you had other lives to live, other loves to profess?

I know you were given only vinegar,
   when all you craved was the living water.

And I, the Honest Fool, met you in that desert,
   clothed in the rags of a *****.
You had come seeking freedom, and I....
   I had come seeking oblivion.

God may have you in His hand, but I have you
   in my heart. And all is as He wills I suppose.
Even though you had made me promise to take you
   to the city where His Son was birthed.

I know only one thing for certain:
   where you began is not where you will end.

I wonder often if we have chosen poorly,
   selling our souls to those who killed Lazarus
after Christ raised him up.
   Are we worth so little?

I want something that they cannot give;
   I want to walk where He walked,
and love as He loved.
   For I was meant to wield a plow,
        not a rifle.
  
What is it that you want?

And if perchance you ever walk in Gethsemane,
   will you weep?
Will you yearn for what ought to have been?
   I will.

It really ****** me off when what I say and intend is turned into something horrid and cruel by someone because of what others have done to them.