24 Poems ~ 24 Hours
A single mother, twice-published and co-author of multiple books, I am a simple poet who loves the written word, her son, and am a professed Anglophile with a loving partner and a wonderful life. The written word is my soul, and I anticipate a new writing challenge.
“I don’t miss him.”
I state this calmly over olive oil and pita bread,
the Mediterranean smell of chickpeas wafting almost cloyingly.
You raise one eyebrow, mute contradiction implied.
I shake my head, almost sneezing as the motion wafts up honey,
hummus, grapes. Chokingly amplified by proximity.
We sigh, mirror images; you are my future, I am yours.
And we dip the bread in oil.
Yet again here we are, words which met love on a page.
I turn to you and grin, whisper words which only you hear,
and your groan, swatting me away. “Not another,” you grumble,
and with your eyes I see it. Potential. Pain. Pleasure, the
vulnerability that is us, the fragile link of communion, which
ended in an exclamation.
When you were gone,
ohgodohfuckwhythehellwasIgiventhisblessinganditwastorn,
and you go to Heaven,
and take my words too.
To which we move, slowly, leaning and yearning
for a taste of something, how we cannot resist.
It is so wrong to want, so wrong to ache and yet
I cannot resist your gravity, your pull to me
is dragging, I am not lagging, I am moving
and falling falling falling.
They call her a woman,
that luminous nighttime lamp.
Was it, perhaps, her coy face
peeking behind gossamer curtain clouds?
Or could it be
her gentle luminosity, her changeable personality?
I see her each evening,
My love, my life, so beautifully full and bright.
My lover the moon,
and I am her wolf at night.
I come calling,
hoping for a sliver, a shy peek of silver.
Glinting off the lake,
rippling over my fur as she runs her pale hands down.
I cry with longing,
and yet she still flirts from her distant perch.
Forever beautiful,
forever lost; and so I sing a song, a love ballad.
Of my love and loss to her distant, cold heart.
Vanity hung, to glitter silver,
the young eyes watch, musing.
Already I see the age, the pull
of taut skin going slack,
the dull shine of eyes blue,
white leaching dark color from me
and spotting elsewhere, slowly,
bones pitted and mottled, stained
with each passing decade, the
fresh peach youth already dimming,
tipping so slight towards the end.
All I know that is is that rain never falls twice in the same place.
Dampness at my eyelids, sliding down cheeks, Hush my child,
it is merely rain. I am not cryin, those are not tears, and yet
even as the thunderclaps and the lightning sizzles ozone,
I am confronted with the loneliness of it all, silent and stoic,
palm trees flattened with the weight of rain, the wind which
screams like a woman and threatens to tip me over side,
to which all I can think is goddamn, this is my death
and I can only mutely watch as light burns and dark consumes,
that pain which slices deep, and you know, as I know,
that we never really speak of it though it’s there.
They stand against the glass, eyes the color of cinnamon, curry, chocolate.
Dusty, grimy, a decade’s hand-me-downs of bright pattern that cries
of hungry mouths, of hungry bellies rotund not with satiety, mimic fecundicity.
Tiny hands outstretched, eyes pleading, we need, we want, we desire.
In the mottled, fruit-ripe lush-dark heat of a tiny town in Mexico.
And in the market, the cries of vendors echoing to and fro,
teasing me of my pale flesh unprotected, though friendly, and painless,
their eyes speak the same song that calls to me, sings to me of pain
and a story that could tell a thousand souls the same old line, never twice.
We need, we want. We desire. We need, we need, we need you, your self,
in the jungle depths of Africa, the dense of a monsoon pressing at you.
Here, your shoulders weighted with the baskets of want, mistaken for need.
Your children crowding your ankles, tears at their eyes, hunger plain, evident.
We need, we want, we desire.
I could write a book on you.
Lines mark boundaries, your hair an unwoven curtain.
There are some places that not even the sun can touch you.
I could write a novella of those eyes, dark sad depths that they are.
A sonnet for your hands alone, a quatrain for your lips and
a few disjointed lines for every bend. A line each for muscles;
biceps, triceps, abdominals, pectoralis, the slope of trapezium, the tight lines
of gluteals and quadricepts. A haiku for your jawline; diamond pattern
refrain for your aquilanic features. A book for you, my love, to treasure
when I slow with age, we both our own slow velocity to our literary end.
Venir, Veni,
voluptous verbs villified
into the meaning of lust.
To come, have come, will come,
Travailler, travaillez
Travaillez pour vous, mon amour,
To work, to have worked. As we do, love,
Sur Rise!
ren To
der falls, the French sur
Innocent phrases for the dirty mind.
I remain, listening. The slither of a snake,
the soft hiss of rain down tin, I hear it.
I taste it, metallic, sugar-sweet,
a memory from some distant time.
The love of a history, the kiss of a past.
My peace fulfilled, my heart light.