Prima Nocte

I discover senses can be just as inebriating
when they come alive
As when they close down.

How can you be so full of meaning while asleep?
How can I have such a strong conscience of you
when you have none of me?

I discover your nights are so beautiful.
How many nights you must have spent like this,
beautifully, unwatched.

How well you fit inside yourself just now,
While I am overwhelmed by the responsibility
Of tending the full weight of ‘us’ for the moment.

But let me just wait for your next
delayed, shallow, beautiful breath.
Syncopated, innocent, all-filling absence.

Patient synonym of life.

(   delicate balance of promise fulfilled

And from now on perpetually in-the-making

‘I’ll love you forever’, I lied

‘I’ll love you forever’, I lied,
(unintentionally of course)
‘You are my everything’, I lied again,
but it was true at the moment,
‘I love you too’, you lied back,
and damn it if I didn’t believe you,
‘We’ll never be apart’, we lied,
and today is never,
‘This is the best day of my life’, I lied,
in fact it was just the day we lied together.

somewhere i have never travelled

(by e. e. cummings)

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

It is as silly as love

It is as silly as love
that I should be hurt
by seeing a picture of you but
with your back turned

as if

Fatal as time love
will not stay the same
and many times a love-that-has-grown
will appear diminished;

as if

as gentle as that breeze
I’d swear there’s a window-open-somewhere -
pregnant like a hope delayed
the answer is held until I ask fewer questions -

if I turned around now I think
I would be surprised not to see the past.