[d]online

Things have changed. They’re no longer what they used to be.
An eager smile with nonjudgmental eyes.
Unflinching devotion and unconditional love.
It’s quite common, they say. Time can do that.
Everything that is so reliable.
Everything that’s safe.
Simply, plainly: Given enough of it,
time will take it all away.

But how do you know things cannot return to what they were.

The stability begins to falter, but you react with reassurance.
Shrug off the incidents with disbelief.
(Optimism is a good thing, you’re reminded)
But the defensive wounds begin to show.

And you know.

When it’s time, it will painfully come back to you.
Crawl across the aluminum table while life slips silently away.
To lay beside you and rest its head on your arm.
Struggle to find your face in darkness, if only to say,
It’s all right. Everything will be all right.

When it’s all over, time will have momentarily gotten its fill.
To leave you with nothing but scars on your hands and over your heart
and be better for it all.

The bees meander sweetly, serpentine among the apple blossom,
filling their abdomans with pollen, the royal jelly.

I watch in wonder of their flight. One sting would sacrifice their lives.
They are the same as I. Propelled by nature, I am propelled by love.

My stinger is poised, my soul aloft, my life in peril. For if she recoils, I am lost.

My soul cannot survive the separation. I am a fool to think that I may soar again.

To live among the apple blossom, waiting for another chance to live.

You drank the whole bottle of wine.
The one you intended to leave for your host.
Gazing to the cascading lights, will you remember this, you say.

She sleeps softly in the room as the door to the terrace wavers in the wind.
Will you remember this view, this feeling?

“I never wish to leave this place,” she said.
But it is something you could never promise.
You’d sooner swear she’d be safe from death, though you ultimately share her sentiment.

“Let’s spend eternity here. Free from life’s design.”

Instead, you ask if you should play along. “Yes,” you say.
Here. Here we will remain for all time.

You contract your eyes to see the town fade.
The streets are gone and only the lights and walls remain.
Dim your eyes some more, and the lights continue their journey down the hills.
Sheltered and encased in darkness, they shine on.

Will I remember this view? This feeling?

Dim your eyes some more.
Close them to the beauty of the town.
And darkness is all you see.

I would rather promise her life everlasting than to tell her that tomorrow we leave.

Will you remember this view?

No.

But as the glowing stars in their retinal cage disappear, the feeling will remain.
And the fultility of upholding my promise to remain for always
and the undying love I swear to you in its place.

if ever i thought
love did not exist
i realize now
it was i who didn’t
nor could i ever
without your love
exist again

i am for you

Slowly, making their way to the front of the room
My family wavers and fishtails like a kite in the wind
Reeled in on a translucent line with narrowing passes
One by one, they land on the kneeler to pay their respects

A flower, to the altar floor, falls. Without grace
Or sound, or purpose, or understanding of why it must
Painted pigments fail when hiding soullessness
Just as our tears and sighs won’t raise it up

My father turned his head away from desperate eyes
So I looked straight and tried to make sense of it alone
And held her hand in church because it was something i could
Hold. Realizing it, and everything, must slip away

April breezes waft through the window, lifting my head from the screen and turning it towards their scent.

Somewhere, a mile away, she sleeps peacefully. Caressed by the tails of the wind that riffles my hair.

There’s the exotic tinge of bergamot and waterlotus and the natural pheromones that intoxicate me.

She fills my mind as her scent tantilizes my nose, lifted from her sheets and hair, moments before.

And I’m floating with her. Her dreams entangle my thoughts as we share a Spring night’s reverie.

April breezes waft through the window, connecting me to my love.

In my desk, third row, second seat from the back.
I silently cried when I learned of Simon’s still body in the sand.
Puzzled who could murder Myrtle and how Gene could jounce the limb.
A static-filled voice whispered “Alas” while I crept without courage
in the grass. Wandered aimlessly through the streets of New York.
Mired in two plagued families, I saw the television news and felt
prepped and desensitized.

Oklahoma City might as well been Camp Repose. Columbine was the domain of the Beastie. Even Ground Zero resembles Golding’s great scar.

Could they have known that my life would echo my homework?
Preparing me to close the books and walk out that door.

In my desk, third row, second seat from the back, I wonder. Does
history dictate great prose. Or vice versa.

I combed my childhood backyard for hours on end
determined to find the ruins of a monastery, shards
of ancient pottery, or the remains of a prehistoric
creature that soon would bear the name of my choosing.

On hands and knees, darting frantic grasshoppers in
the strawberry patch, nostrils held amongst the mulch,
Surveying vantage atop the oak on the hill,

The years of my youth wasted in search of the past
without a relic to show, a lesson to forget yesterday.

She came into my life so quickly,
In the beginning, a student strictly,
But I soon began to look at her with
what seemed to be different eyes.
She was of beauty so compelling,
And of intellect so rebelling
That I found our friendship quickly swelling
Before I, myself, did realize
Before it occurred to me that it occurred to be
without any unnecessary tries
The new acquaintance soon slipped to stronger ties.
Reflecting now I stifle a smile,

And though, it seems, that all the while
We never really forced this powerful
and beautiful friendship to take place.
But let it ride it’s natural course
Through ambitious scene, and tale of horse
Radiating pity, love, and occasional remorse
Beyond a script’s own soulful embrace.
Learning, inspiring, and demanding desire
wrapped neatly behind her willful face
Allowing our spirits to soar and heartbeats to race.

Puzzling now, I sometimes ponder
Of our many pure by moonlight saunter
And how she seemed to read so clear even
the most hidden thoughts I held inside
She has a way of elevating
And easily, craftfully too, creating
Emotions, so reverberating
Only her, for this, can I sweetly chide.
But why, I question, can she take my stagnant
passion and williwaw it to a restless tide?
Conceiving this, from her, I know I can never hide.

Into her eyes, I peer slightly closer
To see what few can ever know, sir
What she really is beneath the skin
from which all that passion does exist
To make her dreams, oneday, all too real
To make her talents peak in appeal
To make her life the better deal
Crossing off each legacy on the list.
Experiencing nights, sights and earthly delights
where nothing she enjoys she missed
As if being loved to her was just being kissed.

And that, I guess, is what I truly admire
Her drive, inside, her radiant fire
The fuel that makes her continue to strive
to give and get what she can from life
Now who can disagree that they
Have declined a joy or slept a day
And forgoed a color for an imperfect gray
I confess I have, sadly, in times of rife.
But she, neither slept, declined, nor forgoed
to make herself intimate adventure’s wife
Leaving fear forever, for a walk along a knife.

You see she tends to dullen the point of words
And sends them down in groups, in herds
What once was great, with her is merely a step
above the bottom of a winding stair case
What is strong in life for her is no longer
The moment long must reach on stronger
She devours life with an infinite hunger
And begs for more at this stealthy pace.
She’s the only one I know that can destroy
weariness, and boredom she can surely erase
Pushing the ceiling beneath for a better standing place.

That must be why I require her near
She brings me high, and keeps me here
Allowing me too to feel that addiction for this new
elevated view of everything out there
I see much farther over heads of others
Lead my life by my own druthers
And pray my passion to get above hers
Just to keep it up with her own dare.
She works a banal cloth of day effortlessly into
an immaculate garb of night to share
And manages, before sunrise, the new day’s wear.

Heightening the former goals of mine
Repeaking all my senses with time
She urges the morph that sends me soaring
so proud of myself and what I’ve become
And all I give in retribution
Is my own liquified fire solution
A simple man’s sole contribution
That allows him freely inside to run
Allows him to take her outreached hand
across oceans, mountains, and worlds
In search of that forever-setting sun.