Poem XLVII

There's no hope for a modern romance
We're distrustful of sentiment, our own and others'
And rightfully so, since it's so easily manufactured
Pandered and peddled, greeting cards, romantic comedies
The empty words of shopgirls who love you in that shirt
An eviscerated vocabulary beaten down through overuse
Can communicate only the trivial

And love is never trivial

Even once understood beyond all language
In the depths of the heart, the bottom of the gut
We still refuse to pay homage dearly enough
Because we dismiss it as a feeling
And feeling is not the same as knowing, we are told
By the parents and advisers who feel that they know
What is best for us

Think about your future, prudence over immersion
Into the warmth and excitement of something
That belies all logic and rules of syntax
Prepares not in the least for the workforce
Or the predeath twilight of retirement

Think of your future, keep your mind off the moment
When you might feel something beyond scant notions of time
A connection to the eternal through another's eyes and touch
An escape from your mundanity where the days are suffused
With the baited breath of expectation like the salt in the air
On some lonely beach astride an ocean
Or the dark musk of a bedroom heavy with love

Turn away from this and call yourself responsible
Or call yourself pathetic
The coward offspring of therapies and savings plans
At once secure in your emotional disfigurement
And again secure in your long life
To pass by joy when a timid soul offers it

Poem XLVI

I mostly sit by the window on quiet days
And look into my backyard at the grass and birds
Feeling like each time I relearn the simply joy
Of doing nothing with an afternoon spent alone

My thoughts are as innocuous and unbidden
As the movements of the birds in the grass
Ambling along, stopping briefly to investigate
Something curious that revealed itself to be left
Unmolested for harder days of concentration

Often my thoughts alight on you, whoever you are
Woman of the moment eternal in my questing
Whom I may or may not have seen the night before
When we made love sweetly for the first time in months
Perhaps I will see you again the evening after
This quiet afternoon spent before my window
Regardless I know that the most I can hope for
In my long life to follow intermittent with crises
Is the next quiet moment and the one to follow
Alone with myself content to wonder

Poem XLV

Grecian bird
I'd like to pluck
Your song from the air
To cup in my hand
And hold close to my ear

Poem XLIV

In your darkest moments
You are always alone
Enslaved to isolation

I love humanity abstractly
And beauty minutely

But moments of darkness
Leave me groping blind
For guidance and comfort
From those ghostly proxies
Of a warm and living hand

Poem XLIII

You beautiful afflicted girl
Tortured in the remnants of spilt passion
Caught in a cup tasted once
Then handed over to be left
Placed forgotten on a sideboard

I see in your eyes the hope for all things
Eternal unchanged trustworthy and raw
To be enjoyed passive to the flux
Of life and occasional abuse

I am the mirror of your solvent anguish
The effigy of your dreams fashioned and burnt
In the shadow of an idol remote and senseless
Erected and worshiped in sterility
While breathing behind you stands your loss

Poem XLII

You were my last chance for refuge
From the consummation of my labor
In the fire and anguish of inspiration
Cast like an ashen cross on my brow
The mark of those cursed by obligation
To a fate of envy, pursuit, and solitude
An emptiness that seeks fulfillment
In the incorporation of a human element
Once nurtured but effaced too often
Until the song of the hunt became the psalm
To honor the vestige of a final defeat

Poem XLI

We hide our pounded faces from each other
We've learned not to display our emblems of war
A day will come when we feel safe in our ugliness
And such an occasion will merit another scar
We fall in love with icons, passion and poesy
We run from revealed nature and honest effusion
We seek comfort in costumed cosmopolitanism
While behind the red flags of manufactured grace
Dwells a wart-covered bubble aching to burst

Is there ever acquittal, or a dawn unsplintered
Into the shrapnel of guilt, alone or accompanied
By the pathetic wreck of someone else's life
All victims of psychology, subverted by passion
That easy clumsy answer given again and again
To the question of how we can stand our loneliness

We're the monstrous composites of a cadaverous past
Sewn together, misshapen, contorted by the hatred
That's the curse of a too keen self awareness

We run, chase after happiness and safety
But safe harbor eludes those who pursue themselves